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Foreshadowing and Establishing Conflict

James Tiptree Jr. also known as Alice Sheldon, speculative fiction writer
Tiptree's beginnings always pack a punch, signaling the conflict of the story without being overly overt about the strategy.
In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.

I see her first while the Mexicana 747 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

The title plays off nearly every line: “I see her first,” (who? is it one of the women from the title?) “a double female blur,” “the near blur,” “the younger blur, “registering nothing,” finishing up with “I never would have looked at them or thought of them again,” at which point the reader is screaming why? why don’t you see them? The answer to that question is crucial to the story.

Here’s another Tiptree beginning, this time of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which uses the strategy of referring to a memory to reveal the conflict. The memory is connected to gender and embarrassment, which will also turn out to be crucial to the story.

Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly — or was he pushed? –into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is Tiptree at her best, examining gender norms and conventions with a ruthless, scathingly honest eye. Somehow that first moment of embarrassment, that moment of being in “the strange toilet” encapsulates so much of what that story is about and how alien the sexes can be to each other as well as how strange their container, the norms that make them up, which constitute the walls of “the can” itself, are. Look at how the center of his masculinity is framed visually: the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. There is so much going on in that first paragraph, including sensory details like the twitch of his insides, the blare of a giggle, the pattern and threat of a zipper, that it’s worth copying out, pulling apart sentence by sentence to figure out how it’s working.

Let’s finish up with Tiptree in a moment that puts everything up front, in the short story “We Who Stole the Dream”:

The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.

Woah. We don’t know what’s going on precisely, but we know crucial details. We have a deadline and it is only twelve minims. While we don’t know how long a minim is, we know it’s not much time because of that “only”. Plus, there’s an auditory echo of “minute” that makes us think they’re of similar length.

What’s at stake? This lives of children, for pete’s sake. Not just child, but children, multiple. And we know how they’ll die: suffocation. It would be hard to write a tauter, more dire beginning.

Writing exercise: write three first lines. They can state the stakes, as in the third example, or refer to some memory or object that encapsulates the conflict, as with the example from “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Include two titles for each, one that plays off the beginning and one that does not.

For bonus points, read “The Women Men Don’t See” and use that as your inspiration.

Feel free to post some of your best first lines on here, I’d love to see some!

9 Responses

  1. An interesting experiment.

    First opening line: “When you’re the kind to get depressed, boredom’s about as dangerous as a gun to the head.”

    Didn’t spark anything after the first paragraph; moved on. No titles.

    Second opening line: It started out as “Someone had given me an apron, a grown-up’s apron, when I was just a kid.” The story that developed grabbed me so much that I finished it, but I had to change the opening line: “I knew what the package for my daughter was before I even opened the box: my grandmother’s apron.”

    The two titles on the second story:
    –Doesn’t play: Inheritance
    –Does play: Inappropriate Gifts

    I went with the second.

    I didn’t get to the third opening line 🙂

  2. Thank you! This was quite inspirational. I only wrote one first line, because I just kept going. So here is my first line, and then what came next:

    At the sound of footsteps on the dock overhead, Lime took a silent breath and let her head slip beneath the filthy waves. In blackness, she climbed down the pylon toward safety, her fingers gripping clumps of mussels like the rungs of a ladder. She couldn’t afford to swim down, to risk stirring the surface where she’d been.

    1. I love that as a beginning, it’s got tension, it lets us know something’s at stake, and gripping the clumps of mussel is a great tactile moment. Write the rest of the story!

  3. Like San (please imagine the umlaut) my first one turned into a paragraph. Which turned into a kick-start for a WIP that’s been driving me bats:

    On her ten-thousandth trip between the van and the new house, Dantang realized she was now wearing the path deeper all by herself. And wearing out her left shoulder. In the shade of the monster chestnut tree, the one embracing the entire roof, she let the box slip from its perch into her hands and then thump down, puffing dust across her toes. The talcum path delighted bare feet, but its dust desiccated eyes and tongues. Dantang worked her shoulder, wincing. Mustn’t switch arms, oh no. Let her just think about hoisting somebody’s cinderblock collection using her sword arm, and Mom and Dad would reappear like magic, never mind she’d heard that lecture already.

    Have no clue if that HTML will work. Oh, titles? I hate them. I have two approaches, ask somebody else and start with the title. The title that doesn’t play: “Undercover.” It’ll do for a working title.

    Anyway, thanx, Cat!

  4. Late to the party, but I’ve been referring back to this, so here’s mine:

    The crows warned her. Whenever someone came down the road they’d start a racket in the trees, cawing high intrigue, like every village gossip on every market corner given rough voice and imperative tone and stuffed into the branches to declaim. The sound startled the rest of the birds from their perches, sending them up in a gust of shadow and form. Mostly, the racket was nothing to worry about ““ a delivery from Iden, or wagons pacing by on their way north toward the Capital ““ but today, as Cael rinsed her hands under the cold pump faucet, she heard a thunder of hooves.

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Nine Ways to Rev Up For NaNoWriMo 2015

Picture of a coffee cup
Want an online writing class to help you win NaNoWriMo this November? I teach both live and on-demand classes.
November has come to represent something for many writers: a chance to participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Participants pledge to write 50,000 words over the course of the month.

The main advantage of NaNoWriMo is the shared energy and impetus to get words onto the page, without worrying about whether they are genius or not. I’ve done it several times in the past, and always managed to either hit the 50,000 word mark or come within a few thousand words of it. While I don’t usually participate in local NaNoWriMo events, like the various write-ins at coffeeshops, libraries, and associated institutions, I do appreciate the feeling it brings of being part of a vast swell of words.

I’ve been mulling over whether or not to participate this year and finally swung into the Aye side. I’ve been having trouble getting my daily word count in lately (this has been a very weird year) so I’m signing up and will be doing daily posts. I also want to be able to cheer on students and friends who are also participating. You can find me on the NanoWriMo site here.

My aim is to:

  • Finish the unfinished scenes from Hearts of Tabat so I can finally start getting that to beta readers.
  • Finish three bespoke stories (one for the upcoming two-sided collection).
  • Finish at least one story for the Patreon campaign.

One thing I’ve learned is that you can put some prep into NaNo beforehand to maximize your success.

  1. Preplan what you’re going to write. You don’t have to have an obsessive outline (although it’s not a terrible idea) but pantsing is more likely to lead to the terrible moment where you’re staring at the page, telling yourself that genius must occur, and then deciding to go play Candy Crush instead. I like the beat method, where you describe the scene and roughly what will occur: They make a fire. Ben makes tea. Else raises the issue of the hunters again. Ben refuses to talk but spills the tea. They hear something in the underbrush. A wolf jumps out.
  2. Clear the decks. This is not the time to take on extra projects, plan to acquire better habits, or quit smoking. Make sure you have time to write, and that you won’t have things that occupy cycles in your head with worrying about them.
  3. Figure out your schedule. Actually sit down and plan the schedule: I will write every weekday and Sunday but not worry about Saturdays because that’s a busy day. Think about the events of the month and factor those in: I will write 2500 words a day so I can finish before Thanksgiving travel. I will take the day of my birthday off. I will write extra the third week so I can goof off that weekend. Etc.
  4. Plan your rituals. Where and how will you write? Every weekday I will go to the coffee shop from 1 to 3, turn off social media, and get words in. If I don’t hit my daily word total, I’ll get up early the following day and get an extra 500 in. Make rituals something that drive productivity, not impede it — don’t get in a situation where you can write only under specific circumstances (if you can avoid it).
  5. Line up some writing prompts. Words are what matter during NaNoWriMo, and it’s okay to write scenes or other chunks that may not go in the finished version. Now is not the time to worry about that — just get the words in and see what happens. So line up some things to write about.
  6. Reward yourself – not just at the end but along the way. I’m a big believer in the power of bribing yourself. Promise yourself some treat, not just for finishing overall, but for hitting your goals each week. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but something you might not otherwise do: If I hit my goals each week, I will take myself out to lunch the following Monday. If I finish overall, I’ll buy those books I’ve been wanting.
  7. Assemble your cheering squad. Got friends or family who are also participating? Sign up to cheer each other on. Let the people who are good about encouraging you know what you’re doing and how they can best help you.
  8. Tell yourself you’re going to make it. Visualize your success and how lovely it will be to have all the words under your belt. Tell yourself you can do it, and keep that cheerful internal encouragement going throughout the month.
  9. Be accountable. Figure out how you can track what you’re doing. I’ll be using the NanoWriMo site as well as posting word counts and snippets on this website.

Are you participating in NaNo this year? What will you be working on?

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Why Titles Matter

Looking at the list of Hugo Award winners and nominees shows why titles matter to stories.
Right off the bat, let me point you at a piece of evidence more compelling than any argument I could muster: the list of short story Hugo winners on Wikipedia. Look at that first one, Eric Frank Russell’s winning “Allamagoosa” in 1955, starting us off with a quirky bang. It’s worth going through that list to see how consistent the quality of the titles is.

Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (winner in 1956) actually violates what I tell my students. It’s the sort of name, an article and common noun, devoid of verb that I would circle on a paper. But it’s such a classic story of its time, shamelessly yanking out every emotional stop, and so it’s pretty easy to see why it was that year’s winner.

Past that, others bear out my thesis. Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Sea With Oysters” (winner in 1958) is a stylish killer of a title, carrying a whiff of Caroll-esque steampunk long before its time. Robert Bloch – “That Hellbound Train” (winner in 1959) (What train, the reader wonders, what is it like, who are its riders?); Anton Lee Baker – “They’ve Been Working On…” (nominee in 1959) (Who are they? What are they working on, and why does the author give us that trailing off, that textual pause of the …?); Alfred Bester – “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (nominee in 1959) (Murder’s a sinewy lump of a word that sometimes overpowers the rest of the title, but here it’s effective as can be.); Algis Budrys – “The Edge of the Sea” (nominee in 1959) ( plain language in a poetic construction, which manages to pull it off given that Bester is usually a guarantee of decent quality that will justify it); C.M. Kornbluth – “The Advent on Channel Twelve” and “Theory of Rocketry” (both nominees in 1959) (simple but powerful); and then Fritz Leiber’s audacious and (imo) funny as hell “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum_Tah-Tee” (nominee in 1959).

Look at the more recent stuff if you don’t have time to delve lovingly through that list (which I think would be a useful exercise for any writer, I plan on doing it myself), which continues to support my claim. There’s Michael Swanwick’s “The Very Pulse of the Machine” (winner in 1999), “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” (winner in 2000) and “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” (winner in 2002), David Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” (winner in 2001), Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” (winner in 2004), David Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk” (winner in 2006), Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline” (winner in 2008) (short and sweet and powerful), Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (winner in 2009), and most recently Will McIntosh’s “Bridesicle” (winner in 2010).

The writer can’t afford to throw away the possibilities of the title, there’s just too much chance to set the hook in the reader there with the right cast. Make your lure beautiful, jingly with poetic principles, flashy or intricate or if you’re among the most daring, something so simple and beautiful in its form that it’s irresistible. Load it with the sensory or weight it with muscular verbs, but make it pull the reader in so your first three paragraphs can render them helpless and absorbed and yours for the story.

A title’s often the last thing I add to a story in completing it. I may go hunting through books of poetry to find something suitable, or listen to song lyrics, or even just daydream about verbs. I may comb through the piece looking for images or particularly lovely lines, particularly ones that occur in moments of high tension, revelation, or in the last few paragraphs.

What’s your favorite title – either your own or someone else’s?

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