When it comes to Creative Writing, the opening can be what makes or breaks the story. While the opening scene should intrigue the reader and invite them to read more, the first paragraph and even the first sentence should be carefully thought out so as to be the most appealing for the audience.
It is because of this that anyone interested in improving their writing skills in works of fiction can benefit greatly from experimenting with writing “openers” to their stories.
To help you get started, you can try out this easy creative writing activity, which is similar to one that is conducted in the Introduction to Creative Writing course at the University of Winnipeg.
Creative Writing Activity:
1) Take about a dozen of your favorite fiction books and copy down the first sentence from each book on one piece of paper.
Is the first sentence of all of these books appealing? What makes each sentence so compelling? Why did you continue to read the book? How does a question, a statement, dialogue, description, or the length and word choice in that one sentence change the “feel” of it?
2) Write down ten of your own “first sentences.”
They can be the first sentence for ten different stories, or they can be different opening sentences for a single story you already have in mind. The idea here is to not spend a lot of time agonizing over each sentence; just write what pops into your head.
3) Compare the ten sentences that you have written.
How do you feel about them? Could a decent story come out of them? What do you feel makes them interesting or cliched?
How this exercise can help:
With this kind of creative writing activity, you can help yourself to discover what it is that you like in the first sentence of a story. Maybe you love all of your first sentences, or maybe none of them are quite “there.”
Regardless, you are likely going to put a little more thought into that first sentence for whatever kind of fiction you write in the future: the important lesson to take away from this exercise is how valuable and influential that first sentence can really be in impacting the reader and convincing them to continue to read your writing.
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Whoa! This blog is AWESOME!!!!! Great practical advice here. I’m glad I met you Sagan, looks like your blog might be just the thing I need to finally write that book I’ve been dreaming about…..
Tanya- Thanks so much! I’m glad I met you too 🙂 You should check out my Living Healthy blog as well; that’s where you’ll find all my raw food blogging. I want to hear more about your dream book!
o.k., after reading this blog entry I went straight to my little library and pulled a few books off the shelf and found some dandy opening sentences:
‘You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.” Paul Theroux ‘Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’.
‘It happened this way’. Graham Greene ‘Monsignor Quixote’.
‘There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double’. Graham Greene ‘The Tenth Man’.
‘It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it’. Orhan Pamuk ‘The Museum of Innocence’.
I like all of those and thought I would share them with you….
Ooh those ARE great, thanks for sharing them! That reminds me, they have a secondhand bookstore at the school with a copy of Don Quixote… Monsignor Quixote is my favourite Graham Greene book so I’m thinking I should really read Don Quixote to fully appreciate Graham Greene’s version!
I read somewhere that Don Quixote has been translated many times, but there are only a couple that are recognized as really good translations. So, you might want to research that before picking up a copy. It is a HUGE book and you would want to have the best version to read.