Where to Start When Writing a Novel?

One often hears that good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. So it might seem logical that someone wishing to write one would start where the tale begins and march forward to the conclusion. But that’s not always the way it works.

The New York-based Center for Fiction recently interviewed Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves, which won the Center’s 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan prize for a first novel.

Among other things, Thomas was asked to identify the “entry point” – where he began writing – because the novel took over 10 years to complete and because it covers a great deal of ground.

“The very first thing I wrote in the novel was an in medias res [in the middle of things] moment -- a version of the section in the book where Eileen gives Ed a surprise party for his birthday. I had an idea of the sweep of the life of this character and this family, but I wanted to start somewhere in the middle. There's something useful about getting into the middle of something and looking around to see where you are,” Thomas explained.

Then he wrote Eileen’s back story before continuing forward.

Somewhat in contrast, Ben Marcus, author of the short story The Grow Light Blues in the June 22, 2015 edition of “The New Yorker,” said in an interview that the idea for the story as a whole “came from a need to build on the opening scene.”  There, a character named Carl walks into a party and discovers that his distorted face is so grotesque that it repels the other guests. “Since he works at a tech company looking to cash in on the future, it wasn’t a stretch for him to be a subject of a medical experiment gone wrong,” Marcus said in explanation of how the rest of the story developed.

The weakest aspect of The Grow Light Blues appears to be the ending where Marcus seems to struggle when attempting to suggest what Carl’s future might look like.

“After a brilliant depiction of a company that's a nightmarish version of Apple or Google, Marcus falters with a conventional ending,” says Louis Mayeux, author of the blog “Southern Bookman.”

Lauren Groff, author of Ghosts & Empties, a recent "New Yorker" short story, got started on the piece as a result of an unfortunate incident: out of patience, she yelled at her six-year old child, felt a sense of shame when she saw the child's reaction and went for a long evening walk around the neighborhood to get over it.

"By the time I got back, I had the first line and that gave shape to the story," she said -- the first line being: "I have somehow become a woman who yells."

Perhaps surprisingly, the story doesn't treat at all with the relentless demands and frustrations of caring for young children that sometimes cause parents to yell at their offspring. Rather, it is a story about the transitional residential neighborhood in which Groff lives, seen mainly from the perspective of nocturnal walks. 

And while the story also hints at a marital problem, it doesn't go there either.

"There's a part of me, recently, that has been rejecting the cause-and-effect impulse in story writing," Groff told "The New Yorker" in an author interview. Life is too messy and complex, she said explaining that she had for some years wanted to write a story about her neighborhood, but hadn't known how to begin.

With respect to my own recently-published novella, Manhattan Morning, I started from the end – a fictionalized version of an incident that actually took place. Almost immediately after it happened, I thought it would make a great story element, but what about the rest?

After thinking about it off and on over a couple of years – as I worked on other things -- I concluded the incident would best serve as a conclusion as opposed to a beginning or something that happens in the course of a tale. I had long wanted to write a sights-and-sounds story set in New York and once I realized I had a good ending, it was a lot easier to sit down and compose the rest.