Tag Archives: Writing Tips

It was a dark and stormy night: Should You Start a Story with Weather?

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It was a dark and stormy night.

Those famous opening words are associated with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford. They begin a much longer sentence describing rain, wind, London streets, rooftops, and flickering lamps. However, Bulwer-Lytton didn’t invent the phrase: Washington Irving had used those same words in A History of New York in 1809, and variations appeared even earlier. Bulwer-Lytton gave us the famous opening, rather than the first recorded use.

Then Snoopy took up the typewriter. The Charles M. Schulz Museum dates the beginning of his writing career, complete with that opening line, to July 1965. For many of us, the image of a beagle typing on top of his doghouse is more familiar than the novel that inspired him.

But is starting with the weather actually bad writing?

Elmore Leonard certainly discouraged it. The first of his ten rules for good writing was straightforward: “Never open a book with weather.”

Your opening words have a job to do: Hook the reader. A paragraph about weather doesn’t give them anything to care about.

Consider this opening:

Rain fell steadily over the town. Dark clouds covered the sky, and water streamed along the gutters.

There’s nothing especially confusing about it. It’s raining. We understand. But who cares?

Now try this:

Martin shoved the stolen wedding cake into the passenger seat, started the car and sped off.

That opening gives me a lot of questions. Why is he stealing a wedding cake? Whose cake is it? Is anyone chasing him?

If we need the weather, we can add the rain once Martin has hooked our attention. It might even be useful to escalate the situation.

This is why I really like stories that start with action. Something is happening, and I want to see what happens next. I feel like am in it and moving right away, not some observer standing around looking at the clouds.

Kurt Vonnegut offered a useful companion to Leonard’s advice: “Start as close to the end as possible.” In the same list, he urged writers to give readers information early so they could understand what was happening, where, and why. Together, those ideas suggest an opening that gets moving without leaving the reader behind.

And that’s the risk with starting in the middle of the action. You can get so busy making things happen that you forget to provide enough context to the reader to let them know what any of it means.

For me, the useful question when considering an opening is to ask is: What have I given the reader to care about?

It could be a person trying to get something or a decision with some uncomfortable consequence. It could be a conversation that has already gone wrong. Even ordinary tasks can become interesting when we understand why someone is struggling to complete them.

On your next draft, try removing the first paragraph. Does the story lose anything important?

If not, I think you know what to do with that paragraph.

As long as the opening gives the reader enough information to follow along, you can usually safely cut those sentences.

And if it really must be a dark and stormy night, please give me someone with a reason to be out in the rain.

-James

What Can Acrobatics Teach Us About Storytelling?

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Storytelling takes many forms. Sometimes it involves a man balancing on a stack of chairs while an entire audience wonders whether they should have signed a waiver.

On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to see Absinthe, an excellent, albeit bawdy, show featuring some amazing acrobatic performances.

As I watched one performer stack chairs beneath himself, I realized his actions were a method of storytelling.

He began with something impressive but manageable: a handstand on the back of a chair.

That was the hook.

Okay, you have my attention. Now what comes next?

Another chair joined the first. Then another. What had seemed impressive a moment earlier was merely his starting point. With each addition, the performer gave me a new reason to watch and a little more reason to worry. Rising action anyone?

Soon, he was 20 feet above the stage on a stack of impossibly interlocked furniture. The chairs rattled and swayed, keeping us on the edge or our seats.

And then he began moving into a one-armed handstand.

By then, he had us. We had followed him all the way up, and nobody was looking away.

How is he going to get down?

It’s what we want in a good story: a character does something that interests us. Their situation grows more difficult. The stakes rise. Each new development builds on what came before, until we reach a moment when everything seems to depend on what happens next and there appears to be no way out.

The performer couldn’t have created the same effect by simply appearing at the top of the stack. By watching him build it, we became participants. We had seen where every chair went and we even felt that wobble halfway up. Was that on purpose? Is he in trouble?

Good stories earn their biggest moments in much the same way.

We need those earlier steps. We need reasons to care, questions we want answered, and enough uncertainty to keep us leaning in. Each complication adds another chair.

At the top, the performer held his position for a few extraordinary seconds while we held our breath. It was just long enough for the applause to swell and for us to take in what he had accomplished. This was the climax of the story.

Then he came down.

He reversed the climb, carefully disassembling the stack by throwing chairs to the stagehands as he descended. With each chair removed, the tension eased. Eventually, his feet reached the stage.

Our hero had made it home.

Watching Absinthe reminded me that a story is also a performance. Whatever ideas we want to explore, we still have an audience trusting us with their attention. We need to keep their curiosity alive and let them feel the tension every step of the way.

They start on the ground with us. Then, chair by chair, we carry them through the unlikely, the improbable, and finally something seemingly impossible.

And when it’s over, our hero is home, back on the ground with an audience grateful for the journey.

-James

Pet Words in Writing: How to Find and Fix Overused Words and Phrases

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As writers, we can have what I call pet words and phrases.  These are words or phrases we tend to use more than we probably should. One of my big ones is the word “just.”  That guy can creep into my writing so easily that I will often find it three or four times in a single short story.  And like most adverbs, it is usually better omitted completely.

Here is how I tend to use it:

“He just felt it was time.”

“It was just the kind of thing she liked to do.”

“She was just over the speed limit.”

I think you can see in the first two examples how removing the word actually strengthens the sentence. There can be an argument for keeping the word in the third sentence, as it is a qualifier as to how much over the speed limit she was.

Other times you can have whole phrases that feel completely normal and natural to use but may be more specific to you than you think. I am reminded of a brother and sister I knew in college who would both use the term “Nanook of the North” to self-describe how they were bundled up in the winter. I am not sure if I have ever heard anyone else use that term, but I suspect it was rather common in their family growing up, so it came to feel ubiquitous to them.

The danger in using pet words and phrases is either coming off as repetitive or, in the case of Nanook, using a reference that may not be familiar to the reader.

While the use of AI is controversial and may go against market submission standards, it can be useful to help reveal your pet words. Here is a an example of a prompt I used with ChatGPT:

Review the following stories for “pet words” and phrases: words, expressions, sentence structures, or descriptions I use more often than I probably realize. Look for repetition both within individual stories and across the entire collection. Identify each repeated word or phrase, how often it appears, which stories it appears in, and a few representative examples. Explain whether the repetition seems distracting or acceptable, and briefly suggest ways to reduce or vary it. Rank the results from the most noticeable repetition to the least. Do not rewrite the stories.

I used it on my three stories I have in the archives on this site (Thin Red Lines, Our Shuttle Ride to See Aunt Della, and The Other Side of AI). I won’t post the elaborate results but here is what it summarized:

The three items I would place on your personal editing checklist are: search for “just,” inspect clusters of “like,” and watch for repeated “looked/turned” action beats.

The surprise for me is the “looked/turned” action beats comment. I didn’t realize I default to that so much.

Let me know in the comments below what pet words you find creeping into your stories.

-James

How Great Writers Break the Rules of Fiction

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I often give tips or advice on the rules of writing, or maybe “best practices” is a better term. The beauty of writing is that there are no hard-and-fast rules. Below are some cases where great storytellers effectively broke from commonly accepted practices.

Show, don’t Tell

One that immediately comes to mind is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. When I read that fantastic book, I kept thinking that he was doing a lot of telling. Card, in fact, has commented on how he feels about the show-don’t-tell argument. In short, he argues that there is a place for both showing and telling and writer’s need to know when to use each, although he is later quoted in the forum as saying “Most storytelling should be just that, telling.”

Maintain a linear Storyline

Another one that comes to mind is the movie Pulp Fiction and its nonlinear story line. That movie changed the perception that an audience (or reader) needs to be fed events in a linear fashion to understand a story.  It’s structure was not random. Breaking from the chronological structure gave Tarintino the freedom to:

  • Open and close with the same restaurant robbery, giving the film a circular shape.
  • End with Jules’s moral transformation instead of Vincent’s death. I feel this is the larger key aspect; he chose to have the character arc drive the sequence as opposed to showing the events chronologically.
  • Introduce characters before fully explaining how their stories connect.
  • Create suspense by withholding context rather than merely withholding outcomes.
  • Make each short story/video feel like parts of one larger story.

Have One Consistent Narrative Voice

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, breaks the convention of a story being told from a central narrator. A total of fifteen narrators (with wildly different personalities and mannerisms) tell the story of the Bundren family and their journey, including one character who actually narrates after her own death. It is an interesting approach because the point seems to be that the Bundren family members cannot communicate honestly with one another, so no single member can narrate the entire story.

The Narrator Is Honest

J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye violates several common practices, but the one that stands out in this book is making the narrator an unreliable one. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, repeats the same words and expressions, wanders into lengthy digressions, contradicts himself. The story has very little actual plot and seems to be mostly an exercise in getting to understand this narrative character. Holden is judgmental, dishonest, and downright not likable. When I read the book, it felt like Holden was either lying to himself or brutally unaware of reality. It was clear that he failed to look at his own hand in ending up where he was or his own ability to make changes in his life he desired (something I feel still burdens a lot of people today). He calls other people “phonies” and insists that he doesn’t care about things that are obviously causing him pain. These weaknesses created one of the most recognizable voices in American fiction, particularly for that time period. Salinger did a great job of turning an unreliable narrator into a form of indirect characterization. We gradually understand Holden because we learn not to trust him.

The Importance of Grammar and Punctuation

E. E. Cummings* is an interesting example when it comes to punctuation. Here is a summary of the conventions he challenged or outright broke:

  • The omission or repositioning of punctuation.
  • Selective rather than conventional capitalization.
  • Words broken apart or combined in unexpected ways.
  • Fractured sentence structures.
  • White space and line placement used as part of a poem’s meaning.
  • Visual arrangements that allowed readers to experience movement on the page.

*Note that his name is often written “e.e. cummings” but he did actually capitalize his own name.

Keep in mind the writers and storytellers discussed above are masters in their respective crafts. They know where the lines are, what they are risking, and how to tread carefully when they choose to cross them.

For a while, I thought it would be cool to be known for having the gimmick of never naming my main characters in a story. I envisioned how cool it would be for someone later to connect the dots on this in an aha moment and understand it was an intentional thing. Instead, one of the first stories that got rejected had an additional comment along the lines of “And what was the protagonist’s name? It is never mentioned in the story!”

Not that a good writer couldn’t have ever pulled that off, but I learned that people do take notice when you cross that particular line.

How about you? What line have you crossed in your storytelling? What are some boundaries you feel need to be pushed?

-James

What Masterclass Taught Me About Writing

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I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Masterclass.  It was great being able to hear from some of the most prominent writers and entertainers of our time—James Patterson, Dan Brown, Joyce Carol Oates, Judy Blume, Walter Mosley, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, and many more.

Whether novelists, screenwriters, journalists, or comedians, they all offered valuable insights on storytelling.

Here are the key takeaways and themes I learned from these masters:

1. Fiction vs. Nonfiction? It’s All Storytelling

One unexpected revelation: fiction and nonfiction writers follow the same storytelling principles. Whether you’re inventing a plot or recounting real events, the goal is the same, to craft a compelling narrative that keeps the reader turning pages.

2. Writers read

The majority of authors find that reading is essential, with Walter Mosley being the exception. His view is that everybody can tell a story.  It’s built into us. If you tell a joke you are essentially telling a story. Gossip is really story telling. Still, most agree that reading fuels the craft. A lot of them call out poetry in particular.

3. Writing Habits: Be Ruthless with Routine

  • Write every day, even when you don’t want to.
  • Leave yourself a cliffhanger or a prompt for the next session. Dan Brown calls it “setting the table for breakfast.”
  • If you’re stuck, type “TBD” and move on. Momentum matters more than perfection in that moment.

4. The First Draft is Trash but that’s OK.

Don’t worry about making your first draft good, just make it exist. Expect to throw out a lot of what you write. That’s a normal part of the process.

5. Respect the Reader’s Time

Good writing is tight writing. Shorter is almost always better. Clarity and brevity show respect for your reader and force you to sharpen your ideas.

6. Storytelling is a Muscle

Like going to the gym, you get stronger by doing the reps. Writing regularly conditions your narrative instincts and builds your tolerance for discomfort, especially when facing the blank page.

It’s also interesting to note that many writers mention physical movement (like walking) helping to unlock creative breakthroughs.

7. What Drives a Story?

Keep an open question alive throughout the narrative. Ask yourself:

  • Who is my hero?
  • What do they want?
  • Why can’t they have it?

That tension is what drives the story and keeps the reader engaged.

8. Your Job Is to Entertain

Even literary giants like David Mamet stress this: if you’re not entertaining the reader, they’ll stop reading. Keep them engaged.

9. Dialogue Is Action

The best dialogue:

  • Reveals character
  • Sparks conflict
  • Offers surprises

Avoid dialogue where characters agree. Instead, make characters argue, push back, or reveal something new.

10. Build Your Villain First

Just like you can’t have a front without a back or dark without light, a strong antagonist shapes a strong protagonist. As one Masterclass teacher put it: “Villains define the hero.”

11. Less Is More (Characters Included)

Too many characters muddle the story. Keep your cast lean so the characters, and their desires, stays clear.

12. Endings: Surprise and Inevitability

Two tips stood out:

  • Brainstorm every possible ending, then pick the most outrageous one that still makes sense.
  • As David Mamet says: “The end should be surprising and inevitable.”

13. Rewriting Is Writing

No one nails it the first time. Revision is where the magic happens:

  • Read your work aloud
  • Let it sit for a few weeks
  • Be willing to cut ruthlessly

14. Feedback: Use It Wisely

Don’t send your manuscript to everyone at once. Send it to one trusted reader at a time. As you really only get one opportunity for their full attention for that particular story. Sequential readers also allows you to progressively make changes, so the story gets better each time you send it to someone for feedback.

Every writer in the Masterclass series had different styles, and voices but they all agreed that storytelling is craft and skill; the more you practice, the better you get.

So, set your table for tomorrow’s writing session. Get your reps in. And don’t be afraid to write badly. You can always rewrite it later.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. Have any of you signed up for Masterclass? If so, what was your experience and who were some of your favorites?

-James