My method of storycrafting probably won’t work for everybody, but I’m going to walk you through it anyway in case it can be of any help.

We’re going to approach our terrible 2006 Felix story excerpt as though it’s An Idea that struck me this very morning. Let’s say I had a dream, and I’ve never thought this much about a French girl in Victorian England with two immortal creeps love interests vying for her lonely heart in my life.

So I have An Idea for a story. The first thing I do whenever I have An Idea is to obsess over it in my head for a couple of weeks and feverishly slot details into place before I ever even think about putting pen to paper.

We’re going to skip that part. But we will go over the types of details that I settle on during that time.

First up, I need to know who this story is about. In this case we’ll keep the name Tannicent (absolutely stolen from Godstalk by P. C. Hodgell, which is still to this day my favorite book) but because I’m not ten or twelve years old anymore and I’m grossed out by a ten thousand year old angel having romantic feelings for a ten year old girl, and because the Idea is specifically for a romance, we’re going to assume that when this Idea came to me last night, our protagonist was already an adult woman.

What do we know about Tannicent? Why do we care about her? Why are we telling her story rather than somebody else’s?

Let’s say she’s just turned twenty years old when the story starts. She’s quiet, the loner type (lonely, alone, sad and alone, as we know from the excerpt), but she’s well-mannered and polite when she has to interact with people. She comes from an old money family, maybe old nobility, so she’s definitely had some kind of coaching in etiquette, probably private tutoring. She likes to be outside, isn’t very comfortable indoors. Why? Well, let’s follow that line of thought.

Is she claustrophobic? We know her family died when she was young. Maybe she survived by the very classic “youngest child shoved into a cupboard” trope. Maybe something trapped her in there. The body of a parent, perhaps. Maybe she was trapped for a long time. If she was still five years old when it happened, maybe it was a matter of hours but in her mind it was days. Maybe she was a little older, say she was ten, and maybe it was a few days before anyone came and found what happened, found her. Follow that further. If she was trapped in a small space for days, not only would it follow for her not to like to feel trapped inside, it would also follow that she might have an unhealthy relationship with food due to the fear that she’ll be trapped somewhere without it. She might hide food in strange places, or always pocket food and carry it with her. It would also follow that she is fastidious about her cleanliness because she would likely have been left in her own filth during that time.

As far as appearance, she’s white, her hair is straight and black, her eyes are meant to be violet and a little too big for her face. I think that the protagonist having purple eyes is neat and everything, but it’s also very, very overdone, and it’s okay for your special leading lady who everybody keeps falling in love with to not have super special purple eyes nobody else has. So, let’s make her eyes blue instead. Let’s say they’re dark blue, and let’s keep the bit about them being too big for her face. She’s sort of got the helpless waif thing going on, but given her desire not to starve and her tendency to spend a lot of time outdoors, I don’t think that’s what she would logically look like from a physical perspective. She might have a small-boned frame, but I think she’d actually have more of a runner’s or track star’s body. She likely does a lot of climbing of trees, learned how to be fast in case she’s chased, rides horses, maybe she can sail. The water would provide her a lot of freedom, particularly if she had a captain willing to let her break some rules and be less of a proper lady out of port. All that would require her to be strong in the arms and legs, and to have good core control. What we’re looking at, then, is probably a woman with a good deal of muscle, not a helpless waif.

And I think Tannicent is smart. She had private tutors, eventually she went to school and learned mathematics and writing and history. I think she’d take a lot of interest in geography and stories of explorers. Remember, this is a woman who we have decided places very high value on feeling free. She is also about to take over her family’s holdings, as she is unmarried, for which I’m sure she faces a great deal of contention. The only way an unmarried woman of twenty, a spinster pretty much, becomes head of the family is for the steward of the holdings to be a very cool and respectful person, and for it to be a lot more trouble than it’s worth to kick up a fuss about it.

However, given that it would be basically unheard of in the originally intended era, maybe we bring things forward out of Victorian England and into a different spot. In order to figure out what might work, let’s lay out what story we’re trying to tell so that we know if there are requirements or limits that will make this more or less coherent in a given time period.

The basic Idea is sort of an Anastasia meets Angel meets All Dogs Go To Heaven situation, with a bit of a Book of Life twist. For the record, being able to describe your story in terms of other, recognizable stories is extremely helpful when it comes to helping people decide if they’re interested in reading it. It’s also recommended to include comparisons like that when you’re seeking publication.

So, our Idea. Tannicent Marin is the last of her family, there’s some kind of curse or destined death scenario she has managed to avoid thus far (how? what has kept her safe?) and she’s got a guardian angel who failed to save her family but has been given the chance to keep her safe and redeem himself (by whom? from what? to what end?), and as happens with people in tense situations and shared trauma, they become romantically entangled. This is when the second love interest appears, sent by whatever party would benefit from the guardian angel failing his task or being dismissed by our protagonist (who benefits from that, and why?), and of course at first he is merely following orders, but our protagonist is just so interesting and wonderful that he, too, falls in love with her.

This is the point where I start getting annoyed with myself because I can’t stand stories like this, but we’re not here for me to write an entire story, we’re here to demonstrate how I’d write an opening.

Based on this breakdown of the story, it doesn’t seem like there are real limiters on the timeline. In the original, as I mentioned previously, there were sequences which heavily relied on miscommunications that would easily be solved with a text message, so having this set in a modern era would have been silly. Now, I still think a modern setting would be silly for this, and the reason for that is that Tannicent and her family are meant to be classically noble, truly good landowners who were beloved by those they watched over. That sounds basically like the opposite of modern wealth to me, so we’re going to have to pull things back a bit. So, somewhere between the original time, 1870, and let’s say a hundred years later, 1970. I’m most tempted by the very early 20th century, somewhere just before the start of WWI. If there was any time in history where people needed guardian angels, the Great War was it.

As such, let’s call it 1913 when the story starts. So, we’re in London, 1913, preparing to leave the country and return to France. Suffragettes are fighting in England for women’s rights. France is pretty stable right now. We’re an explorer and a tree-climber and apparently from Fontainebleau which is basically an outlying town at the edge of Paris, so how about we’re returning to a plot of land outside the forest of Fontainebleau where our grandfather has just passed away, so we’re a bit further out from the city but we still know we’re close by.

So where does this leave us?

At the beginning, of course. The question is, where does this story actually begin?

A mistake I see a lot, and one I have made a lot, is starting the story too far back from where it actually begins. For example, in this case, I could start Tannicent in her room in London, packing her things, having a think about what it means to be returning to France, providing all kinds of exposition and background information. Then we could follow her to the car or carriage, then to the train station or to the nearest harbor with a ship heading for southern France, then either way back onto a train or something until she’s returned to Paris. But that’s a quick way to lose the audience.

Yes, we need to establish where we are and what the rules are pretty quickly, but we’re not going to get a chance to do that if the reader gets bored four sentences in because our protagonist is waxing poetic about things that are just set dressing.

I could have her wake from a nightmare in a strange bed. Maybe she sees a figure standing at the end of the bed, or on the balcony through the flutter of gossamer curtains she can see the moonlight reflecting off of dramatic gold eyes. And of course, when she leaps out of bed and snaps the switch to turn on the electric lights, it’s like there was never a figure at all. That’s an idea. But what’s the impetus for the guardian angel appearing on this night? Is it because it’s her first night back on her family’s land, and somehow that called attention to her again? In which case, wouldn’t it follow that the moment she stepped back onto the land, he would have sensed her? When her car passes the gates, would she not have a strange, almost uneasy spark of a feeling, like the land itself waited all this time for her return?

And here’s where the question gets really interesting: whose perspective should we be using? Should we move back and forth between the two of them (or, the three of them, when the other love interest arrives)? Should it be just her? Or would it be more interesting to start this story from the perspective of a disgraced angel who wakes to find that he did not, in fact, fail completely; how did he miss that? Who hid her from him? Why? Why has she returned? And why does he feel such tightness, such sickness, as though the worst is yet to come?

Now, I don’t want to keep dragging this example out, but there are a couple of other bits and pieces to go over. First, I would rename the story. To stick with the original theming, our working title will be A Single Black Rose. Second, I don’t usually do headings, but in this case I think it will work better to provide the context for the setting up front. It would otherwise be kind of difficult and a bit info-dump-y to get the location and the year in there. Lastly, and this is the most important, I’m going to keep this relatively short, basically just the very introduction, because I’m going to show you all the things I tried, deleted, replaced, decided I actually liked, rearranged, etc., and it’s going to look extremely messy.

So, without further ado, the opening to A Single Black Rose if it were something I decided to write twenty years later:

Fontainebleau

May 9, 1913

(literally half an hour of staring at the page, trying to think of something good to start with)

Those eyes—! Lord, those eyes!

The floor creaks beneath her stumbling feet. The bedside table rattles and bangs as her hip Her hip connects with the corner of the bedside table, but the her the sharp gasp of pain is strangled in her throat. She backs herself into the door and gropes along the wall for the light switch.

All the while, those the a cool glint of gold watches from outside the open balcony doors, set into a motionless shadow like a hulking gargoyle perched upon the railing.

Her Tannicent‘s fingers scrabbles along the wire and down to the switch.

The gold disappears for a blink. An arm extends toward the fluttering gossamer curtains, extending what looks like a dark, inky finger. There’s a breath, an inhale as though someone were about to speak.

She snaps the lightswitch.

The balcony is empty. The room is silent but for her panting and the hum of electric light. Nothing there.

An illusion. A terrible dream.

So why, when the lights were out and she was back in her bed, did it feel as though someone stood nearby—someone who had learned, from experience, that it was better to keep his eyes closed?

As you can tell, I made a lot of changes while I was writing it. I’d make more changes if I were editing it, because presumably it would be part of a much larger piece and I would have a lot more context to work with. But this is a pretty decent example of how I work.

Next time we’ll take a different example, maybe an older one, maybe something more modern, and we’ll talk a bit more about how the larger context of a piece completely changes the approach you’d take.