Story Starters

If you do happen to get bogged down on a story writing assignment, you may find this article useful.  Stories, whether long or short, are essentially about solving problems. Instead of starting out to write an outline, as your teacher may have suggested, write down the initial problem and concentrate on coming up with a workable solution. 

Ideally the solution will lead to another problem, which will require a new solution and so on.  Once you've strung together problems and solution, you've basically done an outline.  Your teacher will be none the wiser.

A productive learning experience is to examine the opening paragraphs of several stories and determine the strategy that the writer used to entice the reader to read on.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

¶ 1.  Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only becuase there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my my pen in the year of grace 17 -- and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow Inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

• Stevenson imparts mystery  -  un-named year and a promise not to reveal the location of the island. 

• He was asked to write the story.  It must be a good one.

Obason by Joy Kogawa

¶ 2.  The coulee is so still right now that if a match were to be lit the flame would not waver.  The tall grasses stand without quivering.  The tops flop this way and that.  The whole dark sky is bright with stars and only the new moon moves.

• There is strange beauty and a sense of mystery.

The Ishbane Conspiracy by Angela, Karina and Randy Alcorn

¶ 3.  The moonlight cast an eerie shadow through the bedroom window.  Jillian Fletcher kicked the mass of blankets to the side of the bed.  She lay awake, weary, but unable to close her eyes.  She appeared safe and snug in her nice home in the suburbs, but her heart ached for something she could never quite identify.  Tonight a foreboding presence seemed to occupy the room.  She wondered if she'd watched one too many horror movies with her friends.

• Right off the bat, the reader realizes that this story is not one for those who are faint of heart.  The first paragraph indicates genre and entices some of us to read on.

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