The End of Beginnings

So, this was a good week.

Actually, that's an understatement. This was a fantastic, out of this world, best-seven-days-of-the-last-1000 kind of week. Since Sunday, I have finaled in five writing contests. Yep, five. I'd entered them over the last few months, but the results all ended up being announced this week. It still seems a little ridiculous though, right? After the first two, I even stopped celebrating on Twitter, because it's sort of embarrassing, like I'd gone out and entered every contest under the sun like some crazed submission-happy fiend. It's even more ridiculous, since four of the five were based on the first few pages of a novel. They were contests judging beginnings.

And I really, really hate beginnings. To me, they're the absolute worst part of writing a book. Outlines, middles, ends, revising - give them all to me, as long as I don't have to spend any more time writing a damned beginning. For Into The Woods (now The Sherwood Confessions, formerly The Confessions of Evie Black, will no doubt change again soon), I wrote 138 beginnings. No joke. On my hard drive, right this second, there is a folder just filled with the pesky little buggers. Some are virtually the same, with a few small changes, while others would have taken the story on a vastly different track. Sometimes Evie is with Miles, sometimes she's breaking up with him, sometimes they're meeting for the first time. Heck, in one particularly memorable version, he runs her over with his car.

For Cairo Jones, my number is - thankfully - far less, but I still wrestled with how to open the story. It's such an important moment, that opening scene. The reader is making so many decisions: on your main characters, your story, even your own writing voice. If one thing is off, you've lost her for good. It's a scary task for the poor little neurotic writer, you know?

And as someone who has been there, done that - at least 150 times, as we now both know - I have a little advice. This is my new theory on beginnings - if you hate them as much as I do, then maybe it will work for you too: Get in, then get out. As fast as you possibly can.

Set the story in motion, bait your reader's interest, then move on. Preferably, make your characters memorable - either surprising, endearing, or just weird enough to make your reader interested. But, really, just hurry it up and move on. You'll feel better, I promise. If it sucks, you can always go back and fix it, but don't rewrite 138 times. Trust me on that one.

And, just for fun, here are my two beginnings (the theory is obviously in action on both of these)...

The Suspicions of Cairo Jones:

Dateline: New York City, NY. April 21, 1927.

Muriel Higgenbaum has disappeared.

I’m the only one who thinks this is a good thing. The entire one hundred and two girls of Miss Minter’s School for Fine Young Ladies are assembled in the chapel. Half of them are sobbing, the other half sniffle into embroidered handkerchiefs. Hiccups bounce off the stained glass windows of tortured saints.

It’s like they’ve never heard of someone visiting a sick aunt before.

Not that I think that’s where she is. Ol’ Minty may be able to pawn that nonsense off on the rest of them, but I know a lie when I hear one. Muriel Higgenbaum is the last girl you would send to nurse the sick back to health. Unless you want the old bird pushing daisies by the end of the week, of course. Muriel’s not exactly the nursing, loving, caring-about-anyone-without-a-trust-fund-or-new-roadster type.

Plus, she doesn’t have any aunts. I should know - a copy of her school file is tucked under my bed back home. A good reporter has to be informed.

The Sherwood Confessions:

Five weeks before his disappearance, Miles St. John pushed me up against a locker and kissed me. Hard.

This didn’t exactly make it into the police report. A lot of things didn’t. Not that night, not our plan, and especially not this little fact: I could have saved him.

Even the reporters, who descended on Verity with their news vans and power ties, didn’t discover our secret. They badgered witnesses and dug up rumors, but still not a single tabloid mentioned my name.

In a few hours, I could be away from it all. Suitcases and secrets in hand, I could get on that plane to Texas and never be caught. Those stories would stand and you people could go on guessing and wondering, your theories swirling around and around until pretty soon everyone loses interest. It would be yesterday’s headline.

It would all be a lie.

And if there’s anything my time at Verity Prep taught me, it’s this: a lie, even one that no one suspects, will do more bad than good every time. So, this isn’t going to be like before. I’m telling the truth now. Not just about Miles, but about everything - the robberies, the fire, the curse.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Uncle Dash says that the best quality in a good journalist is that she gives all the facts – from the very beginning, when things first get fishy, all the way until the villain’s confession.

So, here it is – from my beginning to his end — the confessions of Evie Archer: amateur sleuth, freak of nature, and criminal mastermind.