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alecjmarsh · 6 years

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Introductions Meme

RULES: List the openings of the last ten stories you published. Look to see if there are any patterns that you notice yourself, and see if anyone else notices any! Then tag some friends.

tagged by @theputterer

Full disclosure some of this stuff will be unpublished novels because I don’t have 10 stories on AO3. Also what constitutes an “opening” varies

The End of the Line of Llewelyn Ap Iorwerth, Great King of Gwyneth (Nonfiction, July 2018)

Once upon a time, there was a man named Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales. In those times, Wales was a name for the lands that had never been Romanized or Anglicized or Normanized. Llewelyn’s grandfather, Llewelyn the Great, had brought many Welsh clans under his control, and became the closest thing they had to a king, but it was not one kingdom.

The End of Alexander III (Nonfiction, July 2018)

Alexander III was a great king of Scotland. He brought stability to a country that had struggled for generations. He married the sister to King Edward I and with a clever tongue he avoided bending a knee to England.

Lady Aethelflaed, Queen Bee (Nonfiction, Aug 2018)

Lady Aethelflaed of Mercia was not a woman who took anyone’s shit. Her father was Alfred the Great, who had brought most of England under his control. Her mother was Ealhswitha of Mercia, a woman from the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom that allowed women to rule.

Vampire Hell Novel (Original Fiction, July 2018)

Isaac locked the back door to the bar just past 3 am. He stank of spilled beer and fried food; the quiet of his own mind was an echo after the chatter of a busy Thursday.

Someone moved in the alley behind him.

“Didn’t expect you to take so long, to be honest.”

Midsummer Flowers (Penumbra Podcast, May 2018)

The flower shop is Damien’s, technically. Rilla grows all the flowers, of course. She knows all the medical uses and Latin names and how to preserve them. Damien is the romantic and the flower arranger, and he makes most of the money for them. People only go to Rilla when they need something strong and purposeful.

Untitled Destiel AU (Supernatural, April 2018)

Cas used to eat lunch at 2pm every day. It was the exact halfway point in his day, and provided 15 minutes of quiet before high schoolers descended on the mall. He set his internal clock by those markers. Lunch was from 2-2:15. The first teenager arrived between 2:35 and 2:40. He clocked out at 6:00 exactly no matter how busy it was, so as to avoid overtime. His paycheck came every other Tuesday, exact to the dollar. Today, it was 2:54 and he was waiting for Dean.

Winter Song (Original Fiction, Nov 2017)

Irina burst into her house, her arms filled with mail and groceries.

“Ema!” She shouted. “There’s mail from Mirele and Levi! And the newspaper from St Karlsburg finally came--only a week late this time, and the spring catalog--only a month late on that. Do you think the trains got fixed at last?”

Loud the Waves Roar (Original Fiction, Nov 2017)

King Owain died on a crisp autumn day, four days after his queen.

The day of their funeral dawned equally crisp, but storm clouds rolled in as the procession wound through the cobble streets. The priest began his sermon as thunder cracked overhead, and the people of the city were drenched as they crowded in the streets to pay their respects.

It was the sort of atmospheric irony that druids could have summoned, once upon a time. For a king such as Owain, who had ruled Alpa for 47 bloodless years, it would have been only fitting. But magic had left the land in favor of regulations, or perhaps it had only ever existed in the legends to begin with.

To Lie Under (Supernatural, Oct 2016)

They find the nest of ghouls right after dark. They shouldn’t be an issue—they’ve dealt with ghouls before—but there are more than they expected and Cas is Cas. He’s semi-immortal and nearly suicidally reckless, and he takes a hell of a beating. Dean himself is dragging, bruised and covered in other people's blood, and he can’t protect Cas the way he wants to, overwhelmed by the three ghouls he’s fighting on his own.

Hades (Saiyuki, Nov 2015)

Hades hadn’t always been his name. In fact, if you wanted to be really technical about it, Hades still wasn’t his name. He hadn’t changed it legally. Still, no one here knew what the name on his birth certificate was, and Hades liked it better that way.

SO, patterns!

For a lot of my stories I start very zoomed out, and then spiral in to the story a few paragraphs in. The two stories that start with dialogue or quick actions are the two stories where I know the characters best. Isaac has been my dearest character for a very long time. Irina came to me fully formed in a flash, and I didn’t need a long scene to establish who she was.

I will use present tense for fanfic (3/4) but never for original fic

I like an opening sentence that establishes the status quo in some way. It either shows the part of someone that will change, or what the conflict is. In fact, looking at these, I think my vampire novel is really suffering for a more interesting introduction.

I don’t waste much time with mystery or intrigue.

I used to open nearly everything with a line of dialogue, and jump right into action with almost no establishing information. While I think a hook is important, my writing went the opposite direction, and everyone was floundering around in a white room with no motivation

I still tend to think of this as a flaw in my writing (and I do forget blocking in long, dialogue heavy scenes), but the introductions show that my writing has seriously evolved in terms of language.

No joke, I credit most of this to Maggie Stiefvater

I read the Raven Cycle in the early fall of 2015 and wanted so much to write like her. She describes people by describing the things around them in a way that is captivating and powerful without ever being obvious. Even while I was tearing through the story, I was picking through the craft of how she puts words together.

The rest of this credit goes to @clpolk and the rest of my writing slack, who put so much time into making a story that exists as a story and not just a pretty collection of words. This knowledge has seeped into my awareness from the very first sentence of the stories I tell. (If I were talking about story craft as a whole, they would deserve a much higher proportion of the credit).

Tagging @tellthenight @tryslora @ernmark and anyone else in my writing circles who has enough stories to do it. This was way more helpful than I expected, even if I did fall down a rereading well.

#writing meme #opening lines #writeblr

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