It’s never easy and it’s never simple, but I try to do start a story whenever I think about a story line.
I don’t want to press it when it’s time, so when the story is hot on my mind, I pick up a pen or my handy dandy laptop from my purse and type it up real fast.
Lately I’m finding out that I’m coming up with the backstory, but I’ll start the story in the thick of the mess. It’s more gripping. Like the story I finished, Sex Weed, I started it in the midst of the seduction. Matter of fact, Dyson (the main character) was in the middle of getting his grove on with his brother’s wife. I said, “It was just something so good about sex when it was wrong.”) I know we all feel like that and that’s why I started the story right there.
When I was working on the next story afterwards, Drawing the Line, which I originally wrote back in 2000 and something, but the beginning is boring and I’m not going to get this off the ground if I just start it like that. I want to get into the story quickly and as I write this to you I’m trying to think of a way to get this going.
I bounced over to Chapter four where she (Shane, the main character) accepts to take a ride with a complete stranger to give him directions. Dangerous, stupid and scary, yes, but I don’t want her coming off like that. I want her to have motive and the reader to understand.
Starting a story is hard. Starting a story has to involve so much. Pull the reader in, get them to turn the page, but weave a story from the very beginning and through the reader off into one direction, while you secretly work behind the scenes to mess up their own reality of what they think they are going to expect.
Vincent Alexandria said it best about writers at my last weekend’s conference. Writers are as close to deities as they come because we control a world of humans that we make up. We bring them to life and we take life away.
Starting a story means creating a world and we get the luxury of doing that any time we want.
What other profession can say that?
I shouldn’t complain then about how difficult starting a story is. I should relish that I can, right.
I do relish it, but I really understand God a lot better every time I start a story.
Do you feel me?
Just another rant and rave from a writer on the edge.
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Detroit Native, Sylvia Hubbard, is a single mother of three, independent author of four paperback books and 10 e-books, Founder of Motown Writers Network, and Blogger on several sites, including her own called, “How To Love A Black Woman.”
Visit this author’s website at: www.SylviaHubbard.com
