Strawberrii's Writing Shop

[StrawberrySmiles]

So after reading through old stories, I realized I use the same technique in most of them. I find this boring.

For example, last night I was going to use this line for a story:

The golden rays of the sun perfectly showed the contours of the girl's developing body as she laid upon the grass.

If you notice, in a story I wrote a year or two ago for NaNoWriMo, it starts similar:

The thin rays of the sun peered through the covered window into the large, majestic-looking room. Opening her eyes to the scattered light, Melanie Purnell quickly sat up in bed covering her naked body with the satin sheets she had just been sleeping in. Glancing around the transparent dimness of the area, she knew that she was not in her own bed. She tried to think of the night before, hoping to find an answer to her whereabouts, but to no avail.

What the heck?

This opening just SUCKS:

The stillness of the air was suddenly disturbed by a large crashing noise in the distance as two travelers walked long the forest trail. One of them stopped ahead of the other, her dark blue eyes scanning the surrounding area. Her pointed ears perked up as she heard the sound of a repeated thunderous-like running.

An older version of the second example. Again, I use the sun:

The golden rays of the bright sun shone through the double-paned window, illuminating the large, elegant room. Taena rolled over on her right side as the heavy light touched her creamy white skin, seeping through her closed eyes. Struggling to stay asleep, she placed the rest of the blanket over her face, but to no avail as the sun pierced through. She opened her pale red eyes, stretching and yawning simultaneously.

This one is in your face? Good approach? Or bad?

She laid there, her face and dark hair soaked with the redness of her blood, glimmering from the morning sun’s rays. The bottom half of her body was positioned inside of a large fountain - overflowing with scarlet-colored water onto the brick sidewalk below. Gasps were echoed throughout the town square as commoners and nobles alike gathered around, displeased to see that one of their own was dead.

 

[Daxis]

Sounds a bit expositionary? I personally have a tendency to start a bunch of series with awakening in some way or another.

What kind of intro do you want? How much of it do you have planned out? What kind of audience is reading this? The purpose changes a lot of the ways you can do this. For example, instead of long, descriptive prose, you can do something as simple as


The sunlight entered the room. Melanie winced and groaned, shielding her eyes from the light; it had been a long night. blah blah blah.


In the end all your options have a possibility one way or another. I've found that I'm recently p bad at writing intros, but my better stories from a couple years ago just propel you into it. You can spend time on exposition - one of my favorite super epics started off with an entire (long) page detailing the idea behind a philosophy in theater by some guy from another dominion/world. The topic was actually p interesting, and then it directly led into the thought behind another character, how it related to the character, foreshadowing is motives and reasoning/actions, and then from there it just propelled into the story. This was a rather memorable way to start off the book, and it had pretty memorable text.
The differnece is that your start doesn't particularly have anything memorable, but rather it goes expositionary in nature. It's not like it's a bad thing, but a lot of things don't really matter. For example, I'm tending to leave off character descriptions till a bit way through the story, not the intro. You can have it at the intro, but I find it more reasonable if the description of the character MEANS something.

Just some thoughts.

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

Thanks Daxi! Your tips helped me tons!

So I'm having trouble with sticking to ONE SINGLE STORY.

"I created a small fantasy world! YAY! With races, and gods, and magic, and more! YAY!"

Next day.

*sigh* "I want to write a young woman who sleeps around with men and consumes their flesh afterwards to keep her human form - and not die in the process. The male protagonist will be a creature as well who upholds JUSTICE as a vigilante. SOUNDS FUN YO."

Next day.

"Inspired by the idea of A Song of Ice and Fire, I want to write a fantasy story that's politically intriguing! Hurray!"

WHICH DO I DO!?

 

[Daxis]

So, uh, I have a folder with 100+ documents, most of them each having a seperate/different story, that hasn't been updated in two years, so I'm not the best person to ask about that.

But in terms of what/why I do it, I like fantasy escapists, and being meaningful/creative - I'm all about being 'productive' or not, and I lump writing into the productive field. So my imagination runs wild, and I really like the stories that I like, it's just hard to do anything about it.

Random advice: do a journal? List any and all ideas into a single txt file. I like all my ideas, I just don't actualize them (except for one-off short stories). Revisit them later. I find lots of influences on my stories that makes me disillusioned with their beginnings often - when you look back at your older stories, how do you feel? etc.