Writing Exercise for your WIP (Part Two)

Time to sharpen your pencils.

Last night I taught my advanced creative writing class and we discussed novel/story beginnings. I read several first lines from novels I’d read (or were on my reading to-do list) and gauged my students’ reactions. The students who wrote more…er…violent stories seemed to favor the stories that promised death. The students who wrote character driven stories enjoyed sentences hinting at the person behind the voice.

As most of us know, the first sentence…and, in fact, the first paragraph…can make or break the beginning of a novel. You want to keep the reader reading. Do not bore us with heavy setting description or give us something we can’t learn from. We want to be captured and taken away immediately.

The homework assignment? Write ten different sentences you might use  to begin your novel/story with. Be clever, silly, strange. But see if you can create interest. And, when we read them back in class, we’ll see which students think what sentences are the most intriguing.

I challenge you to go back to your WIP and create ten different sentences you could use. I’ll bet you find the perfect one to begin your novel with.

This entry was posted on 4. February 2010 at 21:25 and is filed under Writing Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.