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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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Retreat, Day 25

Picture of a page of writing
Tomorrow’s online class is Delivery and Description. Click here for details.
Today’s wordcount: 3001 (so far. plenty of daylight left.)
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 119954
Total word count for the week so far (day 6): 23568
Total word count for this retreat: 70229
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, “Moderator,” untitled piece
Works finished on this retreat: “California Ghosts,” “My Name is Scrooge,” “Blue Train Blues,” “Misconceptions of Gods and Demons”
Taught week 3 of the Writing F&SF stories class, prepping to teach Delivery & Description tomorrow.

We have no water at the moment, or at least a pump is broken and we must conserve what we have in case of fires. Hopefully fixed soon, but I drove into Santa Cruz this afternoon and had a nice chat with the guy at the Pure Water store, who recommended all sorts of local places and doings.

I have been reading and reading here. I was watching no TV but Wayne and I usually watch Big Brother each year, so we started watching it while he was here and now have been watching it together while Facetime-ing. Yes, we are huge geeks.

From “Never Volunteer”:

“This is the Other Side,” [Dustin] said. I swear I could hear the capital letters.

“Like with ghosts?”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Not at all,” he said, but didn’t explain anything beyond that. He held out his hand. “Come on.”

“What, you’re not going to carry me without my say so anymore?”

He gestured around himself. “I’m much less worried about you running away here.”

He did have a point. I rolled to my knees and stood up, ignoring his outstretched hand.

I looked around. It was a little like being on the set of an old movie, one where the landscape had been manicured to the point of knowing that somewhere, lurking in the underbrush, was a horde of gardeners with trimming shears in hand.

But here, apparently, all of that was natural. As were the jewelbright bees and birds. When the unicorn appeared, my inner 12-year-old-girl swooned. It trotted towards us and I had never seen anything so pretty in all my life: flowing mane, opalescent horn and horns, great brown eyes with enough lashes that you wondered exactly how it saw through all that.

“Henri,” Dustin said.

It was, apparently, a salutation, because the unicorn nodded before it turned to sweep me up and down with a cynical eye.

“This is it?” it said. Its voice was high-pitched and epicine; only the name made me think it was male.

“You are being rude,” Dustin said. His voice sounded resigned, as though it were the sort of thing he’d said to Henri to the point where both of them were tired of it.

Henri had no intention of quitting. He shook his mane, flipping it back out of his eyes. Was it entirely accident that the sun shone on the tip of his horn, that the gesture made him seem otherworldly graceful, that his mane flowed like creamy froth, inviting the touch?

But I wouldn’t have fondled that unicorn for all the tea in China. He was clearly an asshole.

...

Active Verbs
Pursue active verbs in your writing.
Pursue active verbs in your writing.

Active verbs slice to the heart of a sentence’s meaning, inject action, make prose dance with precise control. Active verbs cajole, captivate, charm, and compel. They lend the muscularity of manual labor, a scapel’s taxonomic precision, and the graceful sway and bob and glide and jump of a dance.

Seek out active verbs, make them your writerly quest. Enlist them in your cause and they’ll help explain a story’s nuances to a reader. Write them down on your shirt cuffs and use them to goad your sentences into performance, or suck on them in your sleep until each dream is a single verb: swim and replenish and grip.

Use verbs, but treat them kindly. Ride them hard but with the respect they deserve. You will find they reciprocate, and verbs will collect in your pockets like marvelous, multi-colored pebbles you can use to build your story.

Writing exercise: Find three verbs concerned with a particular profession and use them in a sentence that never mentions that profession or its tools. Then think about how that sentence might become a title. Then pick your favorite verb and embroider it on your pillow. Okay, I’m kidding about that last. But think about verbs, let them steep tea-strong in your mind, like catfish in the shadows of a riverbank, capable of flicking their tail and vanishing, leaving only a dark trace.

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