How To Start
As of today, I’ve officially had SIX stories accepted for publication this year! “The Hound of Oakenhall” was accepted by Eerie River Publishing for inclusion in their With Blood and Ash dark fantasy anthology, which will be released in digital and hardcopy early 2021. To say I’m excited would be an understatement; I’ve wanted to be a published author for as long as I can remember, and getting even one story—let alone six—published is just…Well, it’s beyond my wildest dreams. It makes all the waiting, all the rejections totally worth it. And more importantly, it gives me an extra boost of energy, an extra push, to continue with my writing. I can’t wait to share these stories with you all!
So, I’m in that spot right now where I’ve polished up my most recent drafts and submitted them to a couple places—I submitted “The Luchador” to Nightmare Magazine and “Goodly Creatures” to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—and I need to start drafting some newer story ideas I’ve been brainstorming on lately.
I’ve got a great story idea I’m really excited about, one that will meld the mundane and the fantastical with my love of Icelandic folklore and the Icelandic countryside. But I’ve been having a hard time sitting down to actually start the thing, which got me thinking about the whole process of starting stories.
I’d say a lot of my older stories were more concerned with plot: I’d come up with a cool idea and not really spend anytime thinking about character or whatnot, just kind of jump in, write about a lot of cool stuff, and be done. Now, as I’ve been growing as an author, character has become so important for me, and I’m spending a lot more time thinking about my characters and their places in my stories. Now, when I get a cool idea, I tend to turn it over and over in my mind with more of a focus on the character as the center of the story, not the cool plot.
Which brings me to this story I’m writing now. I started writing it with a pretty good idea of my character formed in my head, and how they drove the story along. I wrote down a page or two in longhand and then stopped. I just wasn’t feeling it; something wasn’t right. So I put my pen down and took a day or so to turn this character over and over in my head. What were they doing in Iceland in the first place? What made them want to be a construction worker? How do those details tie into the story I’m telling? How do those details affect the POV I’m using? The more I pursued these questions, the more I began to know my character, to understand their story, which made me feel more ready to actually sit down and write. (I’m planning on writing a good chunk of this story tonight and over the weekend, now that a stressful work-week is behind me.)
Most of you have heard the old Kurt Vonnegut adage, “Start as close to the ending as possible,” and that’s pretty good advice, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, how do you even start writing your story? From what I’ve been learning in my writing journey, I’d submit that you start with your characters. They should be your entry point into the story. So to better know your story, and where it’s going, you need to better know your characters.
In my first-ever MFA class—the very same workshop class I wrote what would become “Magus”—one of my classmates said something so profound that I wrote it down in the front of our textbook so I could have it to refer back to when I needed (Abigail Mezzo, if you’re out there, I said I was going to write it down and I did!). Here’s what Abigail said:
“Interesting characters with personal and often conflicting motivations lead to complex situations (PLOT) that reveal something about humanity (THEME).”
It’s our characters that lead to plot, not the other way around. The best stories have fully-formed, well-rounded characters at the center of them, with their complex desires/motivations driving the plot along. Those are the stories we remember; the stories we don’t remember tend to have flat, one-dimensional characters that seem more like cardboard cutouts than living, breathing beings, with a lot of cool stuff happening around them (cough, cough, Michael Bay, cough, cough).
Start with your characters, and the plot will follow.
Thanks for reading! Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and keep writing.
