Tips: Creative : beginnings are critical
- Quick anecdote and some snappy dialogue: mood, good words, context to reflect character. Make sure the readers are right into the middle of the story.
(bit of backfill/explanation if you need – but not too much). - Middle paragraph: the problem/character reflection;
- Resolution: unexpected change.
Beginning/ anecdote
I waited for him at the bus stop, as I always did. Waiting to glare, waiting to mock and just waiting to make him uneasy. There he came, avoiding my glare as he always did and standing at the back of the queue.
“you gunna sit next to me at the back”, I quipped as I sized him up and revelled in his embarrassment.
When the bus came, I watched him hop on the front of the bus, and because he tried to avoid me, I delighted in sitting behind him, kicking his seat all the way to school as I often did, and he grimaced and said nothing, as usual.
Problem/middle/development
However, increasingly it didn’t make me feel better. The more I tormented him, the worse I felt. Perhaps because I knew just how horrible it was to be treated with contempt.
My father had a habit of treating me like a fool and it wasn’t pleasant. One of my worst memories is the hair cut he presented to me on my 10th birthday using the shearing cutters that his own father used to use for his 500 sheep. Bleeding, I had turned up at school and with a bloodied scalp, spread the message that it was the scissors.
ETC. ETC….
Resolution
So on the last day of term, I resolved, I don’t know why, to make a change. Was it the weather? Was it the fact that my father had left the home? I just don’t know. It might have been the look in my teacher’s eye. But on this particular day, when Trifford tried to ignore me as usual, I managed a quick “sorry” under my breath.
I think he stopped for one short moment. I suspect he gasped, but for some reason he did not hurry to the front of the bus as he usually did.
Return to Classes Scholarship Page