“Starting Your Novel: How to Create an Opening in Dialogue with Your Ending” with John Pipkin
October 1, 2022 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM CDT
$59.00 – $119.00
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This Event is for Members only.
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$59 for Members
$119 for Non-Members
All registrants will have access to the class recording for one month.
This class is a part of “The Novelist’s Toolkit” Class Package.
A good opening is the key to unlocking the rest of the story. This class is intended to give writers useful strategies and techniques for starting a novel.
Sometimes writing the opening of a novel can seem a daunting challenge, an obstacle to writing the rest of the book, especially when the long-arc of the novel seems to be stretching off into the invisible distance. But a well-written opening can actually help you structure and outline the rest of the story, and the process of writing an opening offers a writer the opportunity to explore the story’s main ideas.
We’ve all heard that an opening needs to “pull a reader into the story,” but what exactly does this mean, and how do you do it? Should you begin with character? Plot? Setting? Theme? A short sentence? A long winding sentence? We’ll look at a variety of published examples of effective openings, and we’ll do some brief in-class writing assignments to identify ways to figure out what kind of opening may work best for your novel. We’ll look at how research can be helpful not only for finding useful content for an opening, but also for providing new ideas for new stories. Also, we’ll discuss how the opening of a novel is in dialogue with other parts of the novel.
Often when the ending of a novel isn’t working, it’s not because of the ending itself, but because something in the beginning of the story still isn’t fully developed. Knowing how to revise the opening can help make your whole novel feel like it is arising organically out of the opening pages.
TAKE THIS CLASS IF
- You’re have a difficult time getting started.
- You can’t decide what your first sentences should be.
- The challenge of writing an opening keeps you from writing the rest of your novel.
- If you aren’t sure whether to begin with character, plot, setting, or theme.
- You don’t know where or how to find new ideas for new stories.
- You want to know how to revise your openings.
The deadline to register for this class is Friday, September 30 at 5:00 PM CDT.
Instructor
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John Pipkin is the Director of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas-Austin and also teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Spalding University. Originally from Baltimore, he holds a Ph.D. in 19th-century British Literature and is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels: Woodsburner (Nan A Talese/Doubleday 2009) which won the New York Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter (Bloomsbury 2016). He has received fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo, Dobie-Paisano, and the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Iceland. He is also the recipient of the 2021 Harry Ransom Award for Excellence in Teaching at UT-Austin.
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