Beginnings and Endings

When you start a new story, where to you begin? At the beginning, of course. But which one?

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snow plough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words. ~Terry Pratchett

How do you know how far back to go? It can be one of the hardest choices an author has to make. It might go like this: The scene where John saves the woman’s cat from the burning building is full of hold-your-breath action, but if I don’t show the author how John lost his own cat in a fire when he was nine, they won’t understand his angst. And if I don’t show how the owner of the current cat lived next door to John all those years ago and accidentally set the fire, the reader won’t understand the potential conflict between the two. And if I don’t go further back… If you’re not careful, you’ll convince yourself that your contemporary suspense novel needs to start with a prologue showing the main character’s great-grandparents on a homestead in Oklahoma. Generally, the best place to begin a story is with something interesting. That may seem like a ridiculously obvious statement, but it bears saying. Quite often, writers in the early stages of their careers choose to begin in places that make perfect sense to them but do nothing for the reader (or the editor they hope to impress). I’ve sat in on several editor panels and have heard this advice given over and over. Do not start your novel with:

• Someone driving and thinking about how her life is changing
• Two people sitting at a table drinking coffee
• Someone waking up to start the day
• An overly-long, overly-detailed description of scenery

Obviously, there are exceptions. My book, Vinnie’s Diner, starts with a woman driving, but by the third page, she’s in a car accident that sets up the entire plot of the book. Let’s look at the openings of a few popular novels.

There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me – not forever, but periodically.  One for the Money, Janet Evanovich

Why does it work? Immediately, we can feel the tone of the book. The main character’s voice is distinct. And, we want to know what it is about this Morelli that makes him worth the trouble, more than once.

It was raining the night he found me. Demon: A Memoir, Tosca Lee

Why does it work? There is a sense of foreboding in this line. We know the main character is in for something unexpected (because he was found) and it’s probably not going to be pleasant.

By the time you read this, I hope to be dead. 19 Minutes, Jodi Picoult

Why does it work? How can you not want to know more about the person who wrote that line? This book is not written entirely in first person POV. It changes to multiple, third-person, past tense POVs. But that first line stays with you as you read. One of the characters has a secret so big, they hope to be dead before anyone finds out. Which one? Don’t give up hope if you’ve already started a story with one of the “don’t”s in the list. Keep writing! Don’t stop! But when you’ve finished, go back and think about the best way to invite the reader into the world you’ve created and how to hook him so he can’t stop reading. Quite often, you won’t know that for sure until you get to the end. Speaking of the end…

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. ~Frank Herbert

Endings have their own unique challenges. Depending on the genre, there are rules for what needs to be there.

• Category Romance – In a true romance, the characters need to find their happily-ever-after ending. There is one line that prefers you include an epilogue with the characters getting married.
• Mystery – The person who committed the crime must be caught and all the loose ends happily tied up.
• Women’s Fiction – This is a little more nebulous, but the most important thing seems to be that the main character has learned something about herself and the people she loves.

Because I don’t want to accidentally give away the ending to a book you might want to read, I’m only using one example, from an older book. Even if you’ve never read it, you probably already know how it ends.

“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

Why does it work? This is one of those endings that a lot of readers dislike. It hangs there, leaving so much unanswered. But at the same time, it tells you everything you need to know. Throughout the entire book, Scarlett has faced one crisis after another, and every time she finds a way to get through it. Quite often, it’s by doing something questionable, but she survives. By going back to Tara, she’s reconnecting with the thing that grounds her and gives her strength. Rhett is a strong man, and he’s been terribly hurt, but is there really any doubt that Scarlett will win him back? Think back to some of your favorite books. In fact, go to your bookcase (I know you have at least one) and take three or four of them off the shelves. Read the openings and endings. Why do they work? Is there anything you’d change about them? How can you apply it to your own writing? So many ways to begin, so many ways to end. Only you will know when it feels right, and even then, someone may tell you it’s wrong. Be open to advice, but when all is said and done, you are the one who’s responsible for the story you tell. The choice is yours.

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending – the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending. ~Orson Scott Card

*****

Jennifer AlLee was born in Hollywood, California, and grew up above a mortuary one block away from the famous intersection of Hollywood & Vine. Now she lives in the grace-filled city of Las Vegas, which just goes to prove she’s been blessed with a unique life. When she’s not busy spinning tales, she enjoys playing games with friends, attending live theater and movies, and singing at the top of her lungs to whatever happens to be playing on Pandora. Although she’s thrilled to be living out her lifelong dream of being a novelist, she considers raising her son to be her greatest creative accomplishment. You can visit her on Facebook, Pinterest, or her website.

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Chef Author ~ Christy Morgan ~

The Blissful Chef ® is the creation of Christy Morgan. I am a vegan macrobiotic chef and cooking instructor. My business includes things like healthy cooking classes, lectures, private instruction in people's homes, consulting and corporate team building. My first cookbook Blissful Bites came out in September and I'm so excited to share it with you!

Christy contributes wellness tips and healthy recipes for various websites like One Green Planet, Elephant Journal, Happy Cow, Christina Cooks, and PracticalYoga.tv.

Tell us a little bit about your journey from the beginning of your blogging career to holding your cookbook in your hands...

I was teaching cooking classes and doing personal chef services for about five years in Los Angeles. Blogging had become really popular at that time and I felt like I had something to share. So I gave it a shot. Around the same time I got on Twitter and started connecting with others across the globe. I'm a big fan of many cookbook authors. Having a cookbook felt like a natural extension of my blog and gave me an opportunity to connect with even more people on a deeper level.

Was your path to publication of your cookbook serendipitous or calculated? Give us some of the highlights or sweet moves you made.

Getting a cookbook published was calculated for me and the whole process was a lot of work. I spent many months working on the proposal, which is needed to send to potential publishers. After sending it out and not getting a book deal I went back to the drawing board to make my proposal more polished. Turns out I really had two books on my hands and had to split them up. Also I needed to make it more marketable. After many more months of work I had a great proposal that I started sending to literary agents. I found one I connected with and had a book deal within a month. Then the publishing process took another year to have the book in my hands. It was a long, hard road but one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

What writing experience do you have? What is your food background? Did you ever dream of being published?

My writing experience was very little before I started blogging, but I've been an avid reader since I was a child. I knew the kind of writing that I loved although I wasn't very confident that I could produce that kind of writing. I'm still self-conscious of my writing and have a long way to go! Regular blogging helped me gain more experience. When I first started I joined a month long world wide group blogging event called Vegan Month of Food. The goal is to write at least 5 times per week about all things food. This seemed like the perfect thing for a vegan chef to do. It was a wonderful experience.

I worked with a writing coach while I was working on my book proposal. That was crucial to my growth as a writer. She helped me polish my book proposal, which included sample chapters of the book. Blissful Bites is not just a cookbook with recipes. It is full of information and is meant to be read almost like a novel, front to back one time before you start cooking from it. Once I started working on this book I knew it would be published. I created a few ebooks before BB to test the waters and those were well received.

Share some of the most difficult aspects of crafting a cookbook? Did any of those surprise you?

Writing a cookbook is a lot of fun! Creating in the kitchen and feeding others is one of my favorite things to do. I had been teaching classes for years and had an extensive recipe collection already started. So the recipe writing was the easy part.

The editing process was the most challenging thing. Cooking is like a science and things have to be fairly exact. Only a chef can edit recipes and be on the look out for things that don't seem right within a recipe. I had many people editing the book for grammatical errors, but I had to do the hard editing. I will have another chef help edit my next cookbook because when you are looking at the same content over and over again for months on end things will likely be missed. Thankfully there aren't too many errors in BB! Lets just say the next one will be a lot easier to write and edit. I've learned so much from this experience.

What have you had the most fun with since embarking on this journey?

The most fun for me is connecting with people and being able to help them on their journey to healthier, happier lives. It warms my heart to know that my blog, cooking videos, cooking classes, and cookbook have played a part in transforming peoples' health. And eating all the delicious test recipes is always fun.

What advice would you give the blog/book naive Chef Christy if you were coaching her on her cookbook or blog adventure?

Be prepared to be married to your work and don't expect to make lots of money. Being a blogger and author rarely can financial support you so you must have another way to make money. Always have fun and don't lose your sense of wonder and desire to help others.

If someone is thinking about writing a cookbook what are the three things they better know before they start?

You must have an established audience and a good target market to get a book deal and sell books. I started blogging as a way to build up my audience. Social media is crucial for all authors to build your fan base.

Never take shortcuts, be accurate in your recipe writing, and have others test test test your recipes. If you are blogging these recipes tell a story and always post photos of the recipe. People want to see the finished product.

Obviously you need a unique idea or angle. The cookbook market is very saturated and it's becoming harder and harder to get a book deal. Be open to self-publishing your first book to get it out there.

What are the three marketing ideas that you are glad you pursued?

Creating a brand that is catchy and lasting, but is a true expression of myself.

Getting really good at social media and take time every day to connect to my audience. Follow people on Twitter that you admire and see how they are successful in connecting with their audience.

Doing a book tour where I could meet people face to face. Book tours have become sort of obsolete but I love connecting with people in real life, doing cooking demos and talks and sharing samples from Blissful Bites. Once people try the food they usually get the book. :)

What marketing ideas ended up being a waste of time or resources?

I don't feel like print advertising is worth the cost. After trying it once I never did it again. With the Internet there is not as much need to spend money on advertising. In the six years I've been in business I've spent very little money in this area. You can do things like write articles for other websites, be a guest blogger, make cooking videos, do lectures and cooking demos, and use social media for marketing yourself. All these things are free but do take time out of your day. But I love this kind of stuff!

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I hope to have written many more cookbooks and continue to write for many other publications. Teaching is my passion so I will be teaching across the globe. I want to start doing cooking classes for low-income families and dispel the myth that a vegan diet is one of privilege. I want to continue touring, meeting people in person and showing them how easy and delicious a plant-based diet is on many levels.

In the spirit of the new year and all those resolutions we tend to make, Christy is sharing a recipe with Novel Rocket readers.

Pineapple Cornbread Muffins

Makes 1 dozen

I seriously could eat cornbread every day. I love it that much. This is a breakfast cornbread muffin that is to die for when topped with Earth Balance and served with a cup of Earl Grey tea. These are wheat-free, but not gluten-free.

1 1/2 cups cornmeal

1 cup barley flour (or other whole-grain flour)

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Dash cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

2/3 cup unsweetened rice, almond, or soy milk

2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 can (14 ounces) crushed pineapple in its own juice (or pineapple chunks)

Oil spray, for pan

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray muffin tin with oil or line with cupcake liners. Mix together dry ingredients in a large bowl. In separate bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients, then fold in pineapple. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix until well combined. Spoon into muffin tin until almost full. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let sit for 5 minutes then transfer to cooling rack.

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Wasted Days & Wasted Nights by Mary Connealy, Guest Blogger

Mary Connealy is an author, journalist and a teacher. She releases three books with Barbour this year, is a columnist for the Lyons Mirror-Sun, and an occasional book reviewer for the Sioux City Journal. She lives on a farm in Nebraska with her husband, Ivan and their four daughters, Joslyn, Wendy, Shelly and Katy.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

I’m better now, but time was I wrote for a long time before I got to the beginning of a book.

I’m going to talk today about how to pick your beginning, but also how to not let it drive you nuts when you get told, often by a contest judge, that your book hasn’t started yet on page fifteen.

I’ve heard this called an ‘inciting incident’ and I like that. Incite is a word you hear attached to riot. Incited a riot.

That’s what you want for your beginning. Something big and fast paced and high stakes. But I used to write along telling my story and at some point it would all sort of click and, especially when it came to characters, I’d suddenly find a key to them and it would all be real. It wasn’t uncommon for that CLICK to come at around page ONE HUNDRED.

So, I’d go back and rewrite. Often throwing out huge chunks of the story to recreate the character as I now knew he really was.

It was painful to do, toss away all that work, cut thousands of words. I am a Nebraska ranch wife and as such I’m pretty conservative in many ways. No one needs to tell me to shut the light off when I leave a room, or turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater, or buy a car that gets high gas mileage. That’s something I’ve been doing from birth and not because I’m a ecology freak trying to save the planet. It’s because I’m cheap and because waste bothers me.

So wasting all those hours, throwing away all those words, it’s like just tossing out the mushy apples in the fridge when it would be so easy to just make apple sauce. It’s like throwing out three stale slices of bread instead of making bread pudding or stuffing for a roast chicken.

It is not natural.

And then I got a hold of a mindset that helped me handle it better.

I’ve read a lot about character charts or ‘interviewing your characters’ or creating background sheets for your characters. And I realized that’s what I was doing. All that writing that had to be tossed out was NOT wasteful, it was necessary. It was an exercise I needed to do to create my story.

So the next time someone in a contest critique tells you ‘your story doesn’t start until page nineteen” (that happened to me once—and she was right—but it took me a few years to figure that out) don’t get upset, don’t feel like your time was wasted. Just pick a new spot to start, farther on down the road of your story.

What you’ve written becomes back story and chances are it’s all important—it’s just not FIRST.

You need it. Now you’ll weave it into your story, bits at a time, in dialogue and sentence tags.

~~~

My book Wrangler in Petticoats released this month.

DRUMROLL PLEASE—

TODAY.

Wrangler in Petticoats

Ride into the Rockies where love peaks between a tough Texas tomboy and a passionate artist. On her way to Montana, Sally McClellan’s party is attacked and robbed. But then artist Logan McKenzie saves the badly wounded cowgirl who has been left for dead. Can this landscape painter tame the tomboy without breaking her spirit? Sally doesn’t know much about ribbons and lace, but Logan’s presence makes her want to connect with her feminine side. Will this fractured female discover a way to capture the artist’s love—or find herself captured and killed by outlaws?

In honor of that I am giving away one free copy to one commenter here on Novel Journey, so this is no time to lurk.

Seekerville

Petticoats & Pistols

My Blog

My Website

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