#starting a book

[physalian]

“Endings are the hardest!” / “No, beginnings are the worst!”

I’ve never had a problem figuring out the way I want my stories to end but starting them? Yeash, that’s so much pressure. Both carry the same weight for different reasons while you have writers in both camps with legitimate arguments. One may be harder than the other on a writer-by-writer basis, but they are equally daunting.

—

So. Beginnings:

You have sometimes as little as three sentences to hook readers, at most the first chapter. I don’t even give fanfic more than the opening line sometimes (mostly because fanfic takes opening en media res to wild new heights). I’ve been working on a system of “I have one sentence to give you the setting, the protagonist, and the hook that makes this book different, go” and while it might not be perfect, it’s a starting point.

For example! The opening sentence to ENNS is:

Beneath the snowdrift of the longest blizzard Elias has ever endured, the last vampire in the dungeons has finally succeeded in taking their own life.

As someone who struggles with beginnings, I have given you five pieces of information in 25 words:

The setting, that concerns long and repeat blizzards and snow

Protagonist’s name

Establishing the existence of vampires

Establishing that those vampires are kept in dungeons

Establishing that those presumed prisoners are in such bad conditions, that they’re restoring to suicide, something vampires don’t tend to do

I think I did a pretty good job.

So much of the burden of your book is given to so few words. You can’t make it cliché, but try too hard to be unique and you risk looking pretentious. You have to establish the setting, the narrator, the initial setup and inciting incident and convince readers to pick your book out of hundreds of thousands of other options. I hate beginnings.

Best advice among an avalanche of others? Write a placeholder and come back later if it’s too daunting and frustrating because there is no writing advice that is one size fits all.

It’s entirely dependent on your genre, your demographic, the age of your protagonist and how self-aware they are, the tone of your story, your own personal writing style.

“First sentences should include THIS!”

Yeah, okay, but what if I have a better idea? Beyond that your sentence should have a hook that sets your book up as something apart from its genre neighbors, just go look at the most famous opening lines. They’re all different.

There is nothing in common between

Call me Ishmael.

and

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

And that’s the point.

—

Endings though?

Endings bear the burden of providing catharsis, or robbing you of it. Endings have to answer ‘but what does it all mean?’ and stick the landing, or they don’t. Endings can turn a TV show that took the world by storm for four magnificent seasons and drag it limping across the finish line in a finale that sucks the life out of the fandom forever.

Endings either leave you in an existential lurch staring at the ceiling, or in tears of joy or anguish, or frothing at the mouth at yet another cliffhanger. If you can’t answer ‘what does it all mean’ you have bigger problems than just your final lines.

People don’t have fan theories about your first page, they have fan theories about what comes after your last page. There are no rules to writing an ending and sometimes by its nature of being unfulfilling you become infamous.

Example: The ending of Mark of Athena, that prompted this dedication in its sequel House of Hades.

“We’re staying together,” he promised. “You’re not getting away from me. Never again.” Only then did she understand what would happen. A one-way trip. A very hard fall. “As long as we’re together,” she said. She heard Nico and Hazel still screaming for help. She saw the sunlight far, far above—maybe the last sunlight she would ever see. Then Percy let go of his tiny ledge, and together, holding hands, he and Annabeth fell into the endless darkness.

(one short Leo POV later)

Nemesis wanted him to wreak vengeance on Gaea? Leo would be happy to oblige. He was going to make Gaea sorry she had ever messed with Leo Valdez. “Yeah.” He took one last look at the cityscape of Rome, turning bloodred in the sunset. “Festus, raise the sails. We’ve got some friends to save.”

If you weren’t in this fandom when this book came out and ended with the protagonist falling into Greek Super Hell, to wait a whole year to find out what happens next—We lost our collective minds.

And then the next book opened like this:

Gettin’ a bit big for your britches there, ey, Riordan?

How you write your ending should reflect the kind of feeling you want to leave your reader with. In this case, it was anguish and despair and the pinnacle of “always leave them wanting more”. Maybe you’ve written a character who’s suffered constant setbacks to reaching their goal, and the final line is them at peace with, or without achieving it. Or it’s the final plot twist/reveal no one saw coming. Or it’s ambiguous, leaving it up to reader interpretation.

My favorite classical book ending comes from The Great Gatsby and while I had to crack open my copies of the PJO books, I know this line by heart:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

There’s just something so melancholy and tragic about it, as it should be: Gatsby is not a happy story. That line is the answer to the thesis, that trying to live in the past and not embrace the future, not allowing yourself to move on, can only end in tragedy, and yet, so many of us do exactly that.

The image of a dinky little rowboat is always what I’ve pictured, as opposed to a ship or something more formidable. A rowboat bobbing around the thrashing waves, pitted against a force of nature it can’t ever hope to overcome, yet it endures.

The book opens on an equally melancholy note, “In my younger years…” as the protagonist reflects back on their life gone by. It’s an American classic for a reason.

Even if your final line is unspectacular, the line isn’t as important as how the narrator feels about the book being over. Quotable hashtags are great, but if the ending doesn’t feel like a proper fit, you’re going to leave readers disappointed.

—

Endings are so fricken fun though, no matter what’s at stake. It’s as cathartic for me to finish as I hope it is for the reader to read. There’s plenty of advice out there on the perfect opener or the perfect closer, the endless arguments over which is harder, and it’s all up to you in the end. They just come easy to me, I have no advice. I can picture them well before I get to the final pages and they just click into place. Beginnings, though? Ugh.

—

Thank you for 300 Followers!!!

[bluerasbunny]

this just felt like something he'd say

[adriles]

they are Cancelling me for dealing with my grief as best i can . also for the vicious war Crimes

[maibeloved]

Guess who is back in their gravity falls phase! (After it being dormant for almost a decade!)

[chloesimaginationthings]

Happy 10th anniversary to FNAF!!

[rains-inky-mind]

You know those "if this gets 50k notes I'll xyz"? I don't believe in those. Because I could say something crazy like: if this gets 20k notes, I'll write my next book. And then it'll get zero notes. I do not believe.

[ered]

Here’s my take on the whole audio books vs. reading:

Oral tradition of storytelling predates written ones by millennias, and honestly, which one you like is just a personal preference.

The actual difference is

when listening, you have no idea how to write characters’ names

when reading, you have no idea how to pronounce characters’ names

hope this helps!

[pinkpunkdotpng]

artist rendition of what my mom just walked in on

[letwordsflowslowly]

Prologue

Love. It’s something we can’t live without, though through all the pain it may cost us, we wish we could sometimes. Love did cost me a lot, more than I ever wished to give.. With any type of love, there is pain, in some ways more than others. And the bigger love gets, the more intense the pain will be when it stops. At least, that’s what it was for me. Let me explain my sight on it.  

That first love. Where you don’t know it’s love till it’s over. The kind where you’re friends at first and it starts to be more than that but you’re not really sure what it is. That’s the love that opens your heart for the first time and marks a place that can never be touched by anyone else. It’s a love that no matter how hard you’ll try will never completely fade away. The place it marked in your heart will be the type of scar you’re proud of to wear though it aces every time another love comes around. This is the type you never forget no matter how happy you’re with somebody else.

The love after that first love is one that needs to be there. A needy love. After that first heartbreak you’ll try to mend yourself, become a better version of you. You’ll set goals that are impossible to reach and be disappointed when you can’t reach them either way. You might think you need someone to help get you to those goals. Someone who helps you make decisions, who knows what’s best for you, takes a sort of control. Though you won’t let them do it all consciously, but you’ll let them. It’s about being insecure and looking for safety. It might be a love that you’ll regret when you look back at. But you needed it to grow, how truism it may sound.

There might be a third love. This love can happen over and over again. Because this ‘in between love’ as I’d like to call it, is some of your needy love combined with the last type of love. You won’t be able to say if it’ll last forever our it might swallow you whole and spit you out. To make you understand this third type of love, I need to tell you about the last one.

This last love, the one I’d like to call the absolute love. It’s the type of love everybody wants. Where you accept one another for who you truly are. With all the scars and fuck ups you’ve made in the past. This love will help both of you heal from all that. It will make you grow and you’ll move forward in directions you never thought were possible to go. In this love you will lose yourself, but find yourself as well. It’s not like when people say you find the missing part of the puzzle, it’s like creating another row of pieces. You’ll have found an anker that keeps your soul from drifting to places it should never go. Someone that makes the air less heavy so you can breathe more easily. When you feel all of this you’ll know. You’ve found that all-consuming love. Call them ‘the one’ if you want.

Let me tell you about a part of my love story.

[pineapple-frenzy]

Book 2 au with Zuko and Katara Lee and Huamei

Katara is separated from her friends, and so she's left to travel the earth kingdom on her own. She stumbles across Zuko, who is similarly travelling on his own. They decide that pairing up and travelling together would be best

[tom-bakers-scarf]

Spotted this in a second hand bookshop and the whiplash I felt was so strong that I think I’ve discovered another 12 stages of grief

[physalian]

So you’ve got an idea for a story….

Once again and as always, writing is highly subjective and any writing advice that says you *must* do X or all books *must* include Y or doing Z during your writing process is *wrong* kind of misses the point of the freedom of storytelling and I’m not a fan. This is how I approach writing and one way you could consider doing the same if you’ve got all these ideas and nowhere to put them, not the way you must approach writing.

Cool? Cool.

—

We’ll start with how I write fanfic because that’s a far less intimidating market. I don’t write drabble fics and coffee shop AUs. I grew up writing fix-it fics and in-universe canon divergences. Essentially: Stop the real story right here, now what if this happened instead?

Personally, I just don’t get fulfillment from writing fanfic fluff (though I do love reading it). Even if I’m committing time and effort into something that will never make me money and that people might not even read for fun due to dead fandoms or whatever, I’m still going to use it as writing exercise and give it some substance.

That’s just me, though. I used to write stuff like character studies and deep dives, and the last fic I wrote to date was a “hey what if this villain went to the good side way sooner and it wasn’t just played as a joke on his cowardice?” and its sequel.

So I started that first fic with an idea: What if K joined the good guys earlier? How would that impact the story?

Immediately after that, I was thinking about the ending and what tentpole ideas in the canon I wanted to keep, but the meat of the story I knew I wanted to focus on K’s emotional and existential struggle of switching sides, risking becoming an enemy to both factions, after the inciting incident of his (absolutely canonical) partner’s murder, that, in canon, did not get the justice he deserved. When I wrote my post about beginnings and endings, I said that endings for me are way easier than beginnings—this is why. Before I even start writing, my ending is decided.

Basically: Yes, I’m writing a story using someone else’s fictional characters, as one does when writing fanfic. The story uses cartoon characters, but it’s about one person’s struggle with their identity in the wake of tragedy, and how they take life by the horns to make it out of the story the hero they deserve to be recognized as.

And with that core idea in mind, then I write the story around it. The story, which, outside the canon that I had to keep, I had no plan for. The settings and minutiae of the set pieces weren’t as important as what each scene did for the themes and K’s emotional reaction to them happening. I needed to give him enough alone time with the characters of the hero team to learn something from them, enough time on his own to test his new loyalties, and enough time with his old team so he can juxtapose the two and make sure he’s doing the right thing by deserting.

The last thing on my mind was what tropes I wanted to fulfill. Romantic subplots and the like just kind of happened organically and weren’t planned.

—

For Eternal Night of the Northern Sky the idea I had was this: Most vampire stories are about the drama surrounding vampires that depend on humans to survive. So what if I wrote a story where humans depended on vampires to survive, in the exact same way?

Yes, the story is about vampires and everyone can say what they will about people who write vampire fiction. But it’s really about what it means to be a monster when survival demands some brutal decisions. What does it mean to be a monster if everyone is a monster?

ENNS wasn’t planned, I just started writing and had the first draft done in 31 days and through the entire editing process, the plot didn’t change from draft 1 to draft final, save for a few scenes where I had to fix the surface level problem some characters were facing, but not the reason why they were facing it.

The plot never needed massive rewrites because every scene reflected back on the core themes of the story, and every single scene was necessary to tell it. So even when I had to change the intensity of an argument or flesh out a conversation or change the tone of something here or there, the purpose of whatever was underneath remained.

With that throughline in mind, the rest of the book fell into place around it. My core characters each have a role to answer that thematic question, and side characters around then were created to fill in the world, provide friends, relatives, romances, and the like, each with their own perspectives still on that one big question. My villains, too, all exist to answer that question. Outside of the romances, every single scene is doing at least one thing either for the plot, the protagonist, or the deuteragonist to answer that question. ENNS’ secondary themes were also written into as many scenes as I could (of which I won’t spoil here).

When you write with a theme like this in mind, it gives you these sort of bowling bumper rails to help keep you from straying off into superfluous storylines that bog down the pacing and start to feel messy.

Yes, you’re writing fanfic. But what is it really about? Now maybe it is just a coffee shop AU or 50k words of smut—you do you. Not everything has to be deep and meaningful beyond being entertaining. Themes just provide direction.

For example, I like the idea of slowburn fanfics. The idea. I will happily sit down for a fic that’s half a million words long if the characters and the slowburn are compelling enough. There might not be themes, but the story never forgets its throughline—these two characters eventually coming together.

In practice, though, I see way too many “slowburn” fics out there that are just 90% fluff. The chapters stagnate, trading development for taunting the audience with the will they/won’t they. The plot toddles off to to play around in irrelevant scenes with irrelevant characters. Things that probably wouldn’t bother me if I wasn’t already expecting the romance that was promised, the romance I have to keep waiting for when I could just go read something else that delivers it faster and clearer.

—

Even if your writing process begins with a few scattered sticky notes and a notion of what you kind of want it to be about, you don’t have to hammer out pages of prose to be productive.

If you get stuck halfway through, having your throughline helps you sit back and ask yourself this very important question: What does Character want, how do they get it, and what’s in their way?

[elodieunderglass]

hi. what do you mean

[mejkosmos]

why has 2024 literally been THE summer of toxic old man yaoi i'm genuinely tweaking rn

[lunarrosette]

I understand bill cipher bc if I fumbled Stanford pines I’d also start the apocalypse

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

HOT, SINGLE, UNSTUDIED SPONGES. 3000 NAUTICAL MILES AWAY. Come sail the distance and read Tiger Tiger!