This is a bit of a leap of faith for me, but as I mentioned in the introduction post, the Workshop is as much a means for me to improve my ability to share my work as it is for me to help others improve their own. As such, allow me to share an example of the opening paragraphs to a story I wrote sometime in middle school, between the ages of 10 and 12.

For reference, this story was never finished. It capped out at just under twenty thousand words and 13 chapters. The chapter heading for 14 is in the document, so clearly I intended to continue, but maybe I realized how absurd the entire project was and had the good sense to scrap it. I doubt it, though. At the time I listened to a lot of My Chemical Romance (I still do, but I used to, too) and I was as angsty as one might expect.

This story was posted in serial form on the website Testriffic. You can’t find it anymore, as the profile that posted it is gone and I think the website itself no longer exists. But my point is that I was braver then than I am now. I am going to struggle with posting anything I’ve written in the last five years due to anxiety, and I would certainly never share this.

Well. Outside of this very specific context.

So, I’m going to try to maintain the formatting as best I can so that you can truly appreciate the difference between the original excerpt and the one I’m going to write in my current style in a separate post.

Without further ado, the first few paragraphs of 2006 Felix’s ‘Blood Red Tears of a Single Black Rose’ (yes that is the title, no I am not proud).

~1~

She sits alone, as always, in the empty stone courtyard, and she is barely visible through the pouring rain. A single black rose is in her hand, but it is about to fall from her grasp. She is crying, her salty tears mingling with the freshwater droplets that plaster her long, straight black hair to her head. Her eyes are slightly obscured by her lank and dripping bangs, but the brilliant lilac color is visible through the gloom and wisps of fog. Her shoulders shake as she is wracked with sobs. She feels alone. She’s felt this way, as if she is completely alone, as if nobody knows or cares that she wants to die, as if nobody would understand even if they knew… She has felt like this for her whole life. Alone. Afraid. She sits for one day every year in the courtyard of stone, waiting with a black rose in her hand. Always she is disappointed. She still feels alone. She still feels as if no one cares and she fears that she will always feel this way. She has moved through her life as a shadow, a shell of the lively girl she once was. That was before the accident… before she lost them all…

Tannicent looked up from the mossy stones in their spiral pattern, turning her face upwards to the now-drizzling rain. It swept her hair back from her face, causing her eyeliner to run. The rose in her hand was the same one she’d had for every year. She had taken it from the feathery bouquet that had lain across her family’s monument stone in the cemetery on the day of their funerals. The only black rose of the lot. One of her father’s friends had commented that the rose represented Tannicent, the five year old girl who was now alone in the world. He said it was her, because she was the black sheep, the one that stuck out like a thorn in her parent’s sides. She was different, that one. So everyone said.
This place… This had been the last place she’d seen her family alive. This day… This had been the day of the accident. She came back every year to wait all day, sitting on the only bench in the courtyard, waiting. She didn’t know for what… She was only ten now. She lived in the boarding school down the muddy street, with about fifty other children. She wasn’t supposed to come here… She knew it. She would be punished when she returned. But that isn’t for a long time… Tannicent thought, pressing her nose into the middle of the rose and smelling the perfume that still scented it. Her mother’s own homemade cologne, made from rose petals and hazelnut. Tears were sliding down her face, but she hardly noticed. She’d been sitting in the rain since midnight last night, and it was nearly twenty hours hence. Four hours until she would return to her bunk.

So, there’s that. What’s notable immediately, aside from how involuntarily scrunched I become while reading it, is that the formatting is wild. Why is the whole first paragraph in italics? Why is the tense different? Why is there a space between the first and second paragraphs, but none between the second and third?

And let me be clear, there is no indentation in this document, even and perhaps especially later when the (painful) dialogue begins. This was not a limitation of the word processor (Microsoft Works Word Processor, by the way, which much like Testriffic I’m not even sure exists anymore), though it was a limitation of the text editor on the website where I posted the chapters. But in a case where indentation is not available to indicate separation of paragraphs, line breaks suffice, which is why it is extra odd that there’s no line break between two and three.

The other thing that kind of jumps out and hits you in the nose is the overuse of ellipses. Eight ellipses in three paragraphs? There isn’t anything wrong with using ellipses as a stylistic choice, the issue here is the oversaturation. Anything becomes ineffective if it’s used too often, especially this close together.

I have other structural gripes with it, but let’s get into why the content doesn’t really work. First up, the imagery isn’t that bad. The opening line is more descriptive than compelling, but it could be made to work if I were married to the idea of a cinematic zoom on a sad ten-year-old French girl crying her eyeliner to streaks in what turns out to be Victorian England.

The problem with the content is that it’s confused about what it wants to be, so it just tells you what you should know about the scene and leaves it in your hands, as the reader, to give it substance. It tells you this girl is alone, she feels alone, she’s felt alone forever, and it keeps telling you that as though repetition substitutes for making it feel true.

A bit further down the page you get more information about her situation; essentially, she was born in Fontainebleau (a city I knew nothing about other than the name), where her grandparents have a chateau (which I thought was just a fancy word for big house, and I had no understanding of architecture or of land ownership or anything that might have helped), but she lived in Paris until she was three and then her family had moved to London. Her parents died in “the accident” two years later, and she’s been living in an English boarding school ever since, so everybody thinks she’s weird and doesn’t like her because she’s very sad and very French. If you can’t tell, I also didn’t know anything about boarding schools, or custody in the event of parental death, and I think at the start of this story I hadn’t even decided on the time period so I definitely didn’t understand anything about England in the Victorian era.

The rest of the premise was so vague I can barely describe it. The title was a reference to the fact that if she cried blood into the black rose, her guardian angel would show up, except he was a fallen angel working for the devil now because he had failed to keep her parents alive (I guess guardian angels share families in this universe?) and the devil had some kind of plan for her. And then it sort of devolved into a Twilight situation where her guardian angel was in love with her and also the Grim Reaper was in love with her and they were fighting for her affection and the whole devil plan plot sort of disappeared in favor of this weird ‘two immortal beings try to win the affections of a girl they’ve been around since she was 10’ nonsense.

It’s just very clear this was written by somebody who had An Idea, but didn’t think that idea through and decided to just make up the details along the way. It’s like a proto-discovery writing situation. But it was written by somebody without enough experience to know that discovery often means running into dead ends, backtracking, doing a little bit more research, and bringing back a map that’s clear and direct.

It’s so important that when you are ready to start telling your story, you know a few really basic things about it. As I said, discovery writing is okay, so you don’t necessarily have to know exactly where the story will end up, but you absolutely need to know where it starts and you need to establish the rules about how the world works. This can be done in more detail over the first couple of chapters, but if I can’t tell when and where your characters are or even what type of story this is going to be from the first few pages, I’m probably going to put it down and find something with more direction.

There are a lot of different ways to do that. You can do exposition (for example, “On a wet, gloomy evening in the silent streets of London,” etc.) or dialogue (one character says, “Pub?” and the other says, “Nah, mate, missus’ll ‘ave me ‘ead,” which could be many places but starts to narrow it down) or you can even do a heading (“London, 1870”) but establishing where and when you are grounds the story for both you and the reader.

If you’re on Earth and it isn’t an alternate timeline, you should be reading about the time period and the place you want your story set. They say “write what you know,” and that isn’t B.S.; if you don’t know what you’re talking about, how can you tell the story right? People will be able to tell, as you can tell with the mess of concepts from my excerpt.

The other thing is the tone of this story is confusing. It’s about a sad little girl who is alone and misses her parents. She lives in a boarding school. Is this a realistic historical fiction piece? Is it a boarding school coming of age story? The fact that this girl sat on a stone bench for apparently twenty straight hours is extremely strange, but it doesn’t give you any inkling as to what the genre of this story is. You could probably guess it becomes a supernatural YA romance, but that says more about the predictability of supernatural YA romance than it does about the coherence of this opening.

This is one that will require a lot of thought to fix, because at its core the problem with this story is that it didn’t know what it wanted to be. In order to fix it, first I have to solidify the concept, the characters, and the setting. I won’t worry about the plot right away. I just need to know who, where/when, and generally why. Once we have the measurements, we can start to stitch things together into something we can be proud of.