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Start When Your Story Starts.
In her roundup last Friday, yeah write’s submissions editor Rowan made an important point that merits follow-up: Begin at the beginning. Too often as personal essayists we begin before the beginning. Because we’re writing stories that belong to us, we know all the backstory and details and sometimes everything seems equally important. When you know too much about something, the story in your mind becomes a bit flatter, a two dimensional spread of many facts that seem vital for your readers to know and understand in order to get the gist of what you’re trying to communicate.
But that isn’t true.
One thing that immediately makes me skim as a reader is when stories start way before they need to. My eye wanders down the page from paragraph to paragraph wondering, “Is this what they’re really writing about?” “Wait, is this it here?” You don’t want your reader to have to search for that nugget or wonder about your reason for writing. Because we’re writing short form nonfiction here, you have to put that right up front in your narrative hook. Craft an intriguing first sentence. Drawn them in with a masterful opening paragraph. A little mystery is fine, but shoveling on backstory, prologue, and exposition isn’t. You’ll lose your reader before you even get a chance to say what you wanted to say.
Your challenge as a writer is to turn what is two-dimensional in your mind into something that is three-dimensional on the page. There’s no possible way that all those facts can be equally important to your plot. Identify your literary conflict – what makes your story matter to other people – and then you need to establish that conflict in your first few sentences.
This week, take a hard look at your first draft. Ruthlessly edit as you figure out the true essence of your story. Try chopping off your first two paragraphs entirely. You might be surprised to find that you could indeed start your story much later than you thought. In fact, you might realize your story is much more powerful because you did just that.
Yeah write super challenge
The yeah write super challenge #2 may be over and done with, but stay tuned for news for the next one coming in early 2017! Make sure you sign up for our email blast so you don’t miss out on any announcements regarding super challenge #3.
Who’s on fourth
This month we invite you to learn more about Donna-Louise Bishop! The interview will publish Monday at 12pm ET, but in the meantime, head over to her page and catch up on all of her awesomeness.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Nonfiction know-how:
boundaries
It’s that time again. Yeah, you guessed it: the season of family holidays. When the biggest thing on your mind is how your family is driving you absolutely freakin’ nuts and you can’t think of anything else to blog about, but you swore that with NaBloPoMo kicking off you’d write at least something every day. Don’t worry. Rowan is here to help you through it.
Want more info?
Is this your first time here? Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook. If you’ve never taken the time to read them, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines. The rules are a little different for each of our challenges and we’d hate to have to send back great writing on a technicality.
Did you happen to end up here because you suddenly saw yeah write in your stats? Sometimes members of our community spot excellent writing and they send those posts on over to us. We hope you don’t mind. Take a look around and get to know our community. We’re sure you’ll be happy here.
Have questions you can’t find the answer to by poking around the site? Email us or find us on Facebook and Twitter and we’ll happily help you out.
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How to submit and fully participate in the challenge
Basic yeah write guidelines: 1000 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; nonfiction personal essay, creative opinion piece or mostly true story based on actual events.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the nonfiction badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
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