Writers often like to start stories by painting with broad strokes, telling the reader about the world and the characters.
Usually that doesn’t work out.
But there is one book that, despite some other shortcomings, does exactly that very well: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
During the last stream, we took a look at the opening few pages to Ready Player One and examined it paragraph by paragraph.
Ready Player One is a very polarizing book. Some people love it, some people hate it, and I fall somewhere in between. While I wasn’t a fan of some of the overly-detailed writing and a lot of things that happened in the story, the beginning was so good it propelled me to read through the rest.
And the beginning of Ready Player One isn’t a typical opening. It tells us the history of the world, something that we usually try to avoid in our own writing.
So why does it work here? Let’s find out!
Here’s a sample of the annotating we did to the beginning.
These opening paragraphs are doing a ton of subtle work!
Here’s a quick summary of how to start a story by telling us about the world:
Three things to make sure your opening has if you want to give us info/history:
- (1) Make the world and characters vivid with specific details, to ground the reader
- Ready Player One gives plenty of details, sometimes too much, but we can very easily see/feel everything.
- (2) Make it exciting, not just a list of info
- Ready Player One paints its world within the context of the mysterious video, not just telling us info at random.
- (3) Make the main character involved with it somehow
- Ready Player One has Wade make an appearance at both the beginning and end of the first chapter.
We go into a lot more detail during the video, so if you’re interested in leveling up your own writing, and seeing a unique way to write a beginning to a story, then be sure to watch the full video below.
After that, we did a Google Translate prompt. We took this sentence from chat and put it through 10 different languages in Google Translate: “They searched every newborn baby, they are looking for the scar on the right of the neck, the scar was the chosen one, the one to end all wars.”
Here’s what we ended up with: “It’s everybody’s newborn, looking for the right side, one of the best-defined points, one of the biggest wars.”
And here’s the story we wrote, using that as the opening sentence:
It’s everybody’s newborn, looking for the right side, one of the best-defined points, one of the biggest wars.
Starting from a wooden sky, ending in forever. Building to no surrender, the cries crumble lost tomorrow. Raking gashes of memories, across the everywhere, we course through the danger, crashing skull-ward waves.
One by one the steps grow higher, baby’s screams melt to giggles. Hope rises on the horizon, setting fire to the angry crowds. Their tongues wailing embers, scarring several of our number, yet the ones who remain adapt, we are all fireproof. It only takes one, to reach the top, to cradle our baby, and hold her high.
The protest sign, thrust up in the air, eclipses the sun, shining bright behind. A halo for some, hellfire for others. Resonates with new life.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.
Featured image: Amazon