Greetings, writers—
I taught a class at Portland’s Literary Arts this past weekend, and everything about it was delightful. I’d forgotten how much I missed being in a room full of smart, interesting people talking about (and clearly caring deeply about) writing.
Since the class was open to folks who’d completed part of a novel, we workshopped everyone’s opening 25 pages. Ironically, we did not talk about three primary ways one might open a novel (or a story, a memoir, or a poem), which is why I’m going to do it here.
It’s a little artificial to pull this ‘beginnings’ business out of a larger discussion of how time functions in narrative, but none of us have all day, so for now let’s just consider three fancy-sounding Latin terms that describe clear and simple opening strategies.
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