The art of the start

This week I'm in between novels in my writing.  I'm still typing up the final edits to my novel Starfire, and printing out a clean copy for the final read-through - aloud.  So I needed something to do this week that didn't eat up my printing page allowance.

I've written before about giving up short story targets for this year.  That doesn't mean I've given up on the stories I've already written though.  So far I've sent out three for themed anthologies, and I'm thinking that's the way I might go this year.  So I've decided to read through all my stories and take another good, hard, look at them.

There are some which I have always loved, and have always felt pack a powerful punch and really work.  Others... Well, I sensed there was something that didn't quite work in them, but I never figured out what.  This is why it's so important to put some distance between your early drafts and the final product.  Getting the story out of your head helps you to see it as a reader would.  You see its flaws in the cold light of day.

And what I'm seeing when I come back to these stories is that they roll along at a good clip and tell a damn fine story... from page two.  There are several where I clearly haven't mastered the art of the start.  Oh, sure, I've got a nice hook in the first line that draws you in, but then it all falls apart for a page or so.

Part of this is the SF writer's need to explain a strange world so that the reader knows what is going on.  But the best SF writers have no trouble doing that, however strange or exotic the story they're telling is.

So I'm spending some time re-writing the starts of stories this week.  I have a fabulous novella that I've marred by messing up the first page with a long info-dump about why my heroine was thrown off a previous project.  That's all gone, and the new start employs dialogue.  Some of the information can be got across that way. The rest needs breaking up and spreading out.  And some of it I didn't need there anyway.

That's the art of the start: giving just enough information to get the reader hooked, but not so much to swamp her.  I have a feeling I've got a lot of rewriting of stories ahead of me.