Novel Openings

A novel’s opening words set the tone for the story to come. Many great examples exist to capture a reader’s attention and draw them in. My all-time favorite continues to be the opening to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest:

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.”

However, Greg Rucka’s, Walking Dead, runs a close second:

“People came to Kobuleti to hide. It’s why we were there, and it’s why Bakhar Lagidze had brought his family there, and I knew it, and I never asked him why. I should have.”

Read this article for ideas on crafting your own best opening scene. Meanwhile, here are other outstanding examples (in no particular order) to enjoy:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It was a pleasure to burn.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

And one of our own: “They told her there would be pain.” M C Masters, Rewind

Freewrite Traveler

This tiny marvel of engineering is my go-to tool for writing initial drafts on the go. Promoted as ‘distraction free,’ all you can do with it is type. No Internet, email, or other bothersome distractions. Even editing is discouraged (you can, but not easily). The premise is to write, to get those ideas and words down fast as you move forward with a first draft. Most users claim to have increased their output substantially. And for something like NaNoWriMo, where the goal is to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November, it's hard to beat the FT's approach.

The Freewrite Traveler is light, portable, uses an e-ink screen, has a responsive keyboard, long battery life, internal memory in three locations (for juggling multiple projects), backs up automatically when there's wi-fi around, and syncs to popular cloud services (e.g. Dropbox). What more could you ask for writing?

For Evanesce, my debut novel coming soon, I used the FT for large chunks of its initial draft. Its instant on, start typing, don’t worry about anything, and just work approach is fantastic. You can log longer sessions with it or just type a few sentences as they occur to you and in the scrap time you have available. Nice!

I use it for basic drafts, brainstorming, and more (including this short article!). Of course, once the words are down, a lot of effort goes into taking these initial drafts and turning them into a full-blown story. But that's the editing and rewriting stages (and I use Scrivener for that).

To get ideas down fast, it’s hard to beat this tool. Check it out.