Hello, writers. Write On! is returning now to the 8 p.m. Eastern/5 p.m. Pacific timeslot that we had previously. I hope this will be more convenient for the West Coast folks.
Lately, for various reasons, I’ve been looking at a lot of unpublished manuscripts. And it has struck me that an awful lot of them begin in the same way.
They begin with the main character waking up.
Now, I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad way to begin. However, when nearly everyone begins this way, it’s hard to stand out.
More often than not, the character wakes up (as so many of us do in real life) only to find that s/he is late for something. The character leaps out of bed and rushes through the setting as the author discloses what it is the character is late for and why that’s important; infodumps, in other words.
Like I said, it’s not bad necessarily. It’s not in media res; it’s not starting at the point (as my sister used to say) when the character is hanging over the edge of a cliff by his fingers. But it’ll do.
Or it would, if everyone didn’t do it.
When you have a trope that’s being done to death, you have to either avoid it, or subvert it. Make it a little different. Do something no one else has done with it.
Which brings us to tonight’s challenge.
Tonight’s challenge:
Pick a protagonist, any protagonist.
Write a story opening in which s/he is waking up.
But put in a little twist.
Try to limit yourself to 100 words.
If you can’t decide who the character is, choose from one of these:
The king of the fairies.
A Callow Youth.
Belinda.
A kitten named Whiskers.
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