Great Beginnings Part 2

Great Beginnings continued . . .

The Conversational Beginning: "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke

Starting off your story with dialog is a great way to allow readers to dive right into your story. When your story begins with a conversation, your readers are immediately plunged into the action of the story. Description of settings and characters will come later. If you are talented at writing dialog, you should be able to make their words tell the reader a lot about who they are.

Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" begins:

"This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer."

With just two sentences of dialog, the reader already knows something about the character of Dr. Wagner and a good deal about what the story is going to be about. Dialog can be a great way to say a lot in a short amount of space because it has the dual nature of defining characters and advancing the plot.

If you are concerned that the beginning of your story is too dull, and not riveting enough, you may want to try beginning with dialog. The dialog need not be overly descriptive. It may simply be something that will catch the reader's attention and force them to read on.

The Journal Approach: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Many stories written in the first person can sound too stiff and informal. There is also the tendency to describe everything all at once which can make for a big infodump at the beginning of your story. One solution to this dilemma is to have the narrator speak by means of a journal or diary. In this way, the narration style can be very informal. Writing by way of the journal, allows your story to unfold naturally over time without overwhelming your reader with information at the beginning of the story.

"Flowers for Algernon" is a great example because we see the narrator, Charlie Gordon change dramatically throughout the story as we read his journal entries. Daniel Keyes chose to give us Charlie's misspellings so that the first sentence of the story reads: Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. Such details help to make the journal seem "real" to the reader.

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