Stories at the Table, Beginnings and Endings, and a Prompt

I love how, in continued practice, techniques naturally unfold and lessons slide into place. 

Stories

Last Saturday at our monthly creative writing class, a few core writers and I sat around the table and read our stories based on the previous month’s prompt, After the storm. We followed along the lines of Barbara Hurd’s essay, “Wordwrack: Openings,” which begins with a beautiful first line:

A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped.

Like Hurd, we told our own stories of storms and the debris left behind, markers – some physical, some emotional –  that became signs of relief as much as evidence of our fears.

The amazing part in listening to these stories this month was witnessing how the writing in this group has morphed from a very natural, everyday style of storytelling to a strong use of technique. A few writers made the decision not to begin their stories in a traditional way, with a mini-prologue of sorts, but to open with the moment that carried the most heat, weaving in backstory when necessary. Their stories read like true flash nonfiction: “discrete, sharply focused…[revealing] the secrets of human nature contained therein” (as Dinty Moore says in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction).

And, the way these writer told their stories segued perfectly into this month’s topic: beginnings and endings. 

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.                                          ~ Graham Greene

Because the pieces we write in this group are so short and only a glimpse into our experiences, beginnings and endings are both critical in holding our readers attention or in conveying our message.

Beginnings

“[T]o begin is to commit, to stay, to hold.” ~Jenny Boully

Embryonic moments from an experience – like In the beginning or When I was born – don’t always mark the perfect opening for a story; a great beginning is when a certain energy strikes the page, when the reader tightens her grip on the book or the listener narrows his focus on what he is hearing. 

Endings

“An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost. . . . [An ending] is an emptiness that tugs you to read the ending once more, to read the beginning again.” ~ Jenny Boully

Likewise, endings do not always bring us to a nice, clean close. As in real life, endings can come without warning or they can leave us deep in thought for days, even months afterward. They might even push us to return to the beginning, to search for clues or to simply recover the emotion lost or gained in the experience. 

A wonderful example of all this is Vicky Mlyneic’s essay on BREVITY, “This I Am Allowed.” Read it, see where she begins; consider what she leaves out and where she stops. Then, turn to your own story. The place you begin and end can make all the difference. 

The Prompt

And then it happened.

* Photo credit: taliesin from morguefile.com