Kress, Nancy - Beginnings, Middles & Ends (Elements of Fictio

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BEGINNINGS,

MIDDLES

AND ENDS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Kress is the author of five novels and two collections of

short stories. Her sixth novel, Beggars in Spain, is forthcoming

from AvoNova. She is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award,

given by the Science Fiction Writers of America for the best sto-

ries of the year. She is fiction columnist for Writer's Digest maga-

zine and frequently teaches writing at various universities. She

lives in Brockport, New York, with her husband, Marcos Don-

nelly, and her two sons, Kevin and Brian.

BEGINNINGS,

MIDDLES

AND ENDS

NANCY KRESS

Writer's

Digest

Books

CINCINNATI, OHIO

Excerpt from the short story "Lily Red" by Karen Joy Fowler

used with permission of the author.

Kress. Printed and bound in the United States of America. All

rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in

any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including

information storage and retrieval systems without permission

in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may

quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writer's Digest

Books, an imprint of F&W Publications, Inc., 1507 Dana Ave-

nue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45207; 1-800-289-0963. First edition.

Portions of this book have previously appeared in Nancy

Kress's "Fiction" column in Writer's Digest magazine.

This hardcover edition of Beginnings, Middles and Ends fea-

tures a "self-jacket" that eliminates the need for a separate

dust jacket. It provides sturdy protection for your book while

it saves paper, trees and energy.

97 96 95 945 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kress, Nancy.

Beginnings, middles and ends / by Nancy Kress.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-89879-550-8

1. Fiction—Technique. I. Title.

PN3355.K73 1993

808.3-dc20 92-29822

CIP

Edited by Jack Heffron

For Miriam,

Nick, Mark, and

all the other writers

I've been privileged to work with

as students

"A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and

the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same.

It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to

project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of

the person who reads it."

—Ernest Hemingway

CONTENTS

Introduction:

The Story in Your Head • 1

PART I: BEGINNINGS • 5

1. The Very Beginning: Your Opening Scene • 6

2. The Later Beginning: Your Second

Scene • 32

3. Help for Beginnings: Early Revision • 52

PART II: MIDDLES • 59

4. The Middle: Staying on Track • 60

5. Under Development: Your Characters at

Midstory • 80

6. Help for Middles: Getting Unstuck • 92

PART III: ENDINGS • 103

7. Satisfying Endings: Delivering on the

Promise • 104

8. The Very End: Last Scene, Last Paragraph,

Last Sentence • 120

9. Help for Endings: The Last Hurrah • 132

INTRODUCTION

THE STORY

IN YOUR HEAD

There's a story in your head—or maybe just the start of a story.

Characters are walking around in there, talking to each other,

doing things to the furniture, gesturing and shouting and laugh-

ing. You can see it all so clearly, like a movie rolling in your mind.

It's going to be terrific. Excited, you sit down to write.

But something happens. The story that comes out on the

page isn't the same as the story in your head. The dialogue is

flatter, the action doesn't read right, the feel just isn't the same.

There's a gap between the story you can visualize and the one

you know how to write. And at the moment, that gap resembles

the Mariana Trench—deep, scary and uncrossable.

If you've ever felt this way about your writing, you're not

alone. The truth is that there's always a gap between the story as

you imagined it—compelling, insightful, rich with subtle nu-

ance—and what actually ends up in the manuscript. This is be-

cause stories must be written, and read, one word at a time, with

information accumulating in the reader's mind to create the full

picture. This slow, linear accretion of impressions can't ever quite

equal that perfect flash of inspiration in which all the parts of

the story—action, meaning, nuances, insights, all of it—burst

into the brain all at once. Words, unlike movies, are not a multi-

sensory event. Words are symbols, and symbols don't work di-

rectly on the human senses. They work secondhand, through

suggestions to the reader's imagination, through words describ-

ing what you saw in your imagination.

2 BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS

No wonder there's always a gap between the story in the

writer's head and the one she puts into the reader's head.

For professional writers, that gap may be small. A profes-

sional learns what information to present—and in what order—

to make the words convey her original vision as closely as possi-

ble. The beginning writer must learn this, too. One way to do

that is to write a lot—some people say a million words—until you

get better through trial and error. Another is to receive reliable

criticism on which parts of your story are conveying your vision

and which are not. A good writing class can do this for you. A

third way is to read books like this to learn how good writers

present information to their reader's imagination.

That "third way" isn't really sufficient by itself, of course.

Learning about writing won't help you write better unless you

actually apply what you learn to a story in progress—just as

learning about the ideal golf swing won't improve your score

unless you actually practice on the links. There's no substitute

for practice. The Mariana Trench doesn't get crossed by discuss-

ing it.

Nor will this book help you improve the quality of the story

in your head. That vision comes from everything about you: your

experiences, your imagination, your beliefs about the world,

your powers of perception, your interests, your sophistication,

your previous reading, your soul. Vision, sometimes called tal-

ent, is not a teachable attribute.

What is teachable, and what this book can help you with, is

craft. Craft is the process of getting the story in your head onto

the page in a form that readers can follow, and remain interested

in, and enjoy. Finding that form means making literally hun-

dreds of decisions in the course of a short story: What do I show

first? How much background should I tell here? What scene

should I put next? This plot development or that one? This

noun, or that one? This ending, or something else I haven't

thought of yet? Help!

Craft can be helped. Craft can be taught. Craft can help you

narrow—if not completely eliminate—the gap between the story

in your head and the story on the page. Craft is a set of navigation

tools for crossing the Mariana Trench.

Introduction: The Story in Your Head 3

THREE PATTERNS FOR STORIES

THAT AREN'T WORKING

In my years of teaching, I've noticed three distinct patterns in

student stories, which are often also habitual patterns for the

stories' writers. One kind of story starts very slowly. Events drag,

characters seem confused, and even the prose is a bit clumsy.

Then, somewhere around page five for a short story or chapter

three for a novel, the writer suddenly hits his stride or finds his

voice. The story picks up, and from that point on it becomes

more and more interesting.

This writer needs help with beginnings.

A second type of story starts well, with a strong hook and a

sure tone. The first scene presents intriguing characters and

raises interesting questions. Sometimes even the second scene

works well. After that, however, the story flounders. It's as if the

writer didn't know how to answer the intriguing questions, or

develop the characters and their situation. In desperation he

plunges ahead anyway, and the story winds down into confusion

or dragginess or boredom.

This writer needs help with middles.

Finally, there is the story that sustains interest right to the

last scene. The reader is racing along, dying to know how it all

comes out or what it all means. But she never does. Instead she

finds a resolution that leaves major plotlines hanging, or is out

of character, or doesn't seem to add up to anything meaningful,

or trails off into pseudosymbolism that doesn't seem connected

to the events of the story. The reader feels cheated. The writer

gets rejected—but often not right away. Many such stories earn

editorial requests for a rewrite, since the editor doesn't want to

believe that such promising fireworks have to fizzle out. The re-

quest spotlights the problem but doesn't solve it.

This writer needs help with endings.

To some extent, of course, these are artificial divisions. What

you write in the beginning of your story is intimately connected

with the middle, which in turn gives birth to the end. A well-

written story is a living whole. But by examining beginnings,

middles and ends one at a time, we can identify some of the

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摘要：

BEGINNINGS,MIDDLESANDENDSABOUTTHEAUTHORNancyKressistheauthoroffivenovelsandtwocollectionsofshortstories.Hersixthnovel,BeggarsinSpain,isforthcomingfromAvoNova.Sheisatwo-timewinneroftheNebulaAward,givenbytheScienceFictionWritersofAmericaforthebeststo-riesoftheyear.SheisfictioncolumnistforWriter'sDiges...

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