Kurt Connegut says that your should 'start [a story] as close to the end as possible'. How do you interpret this? What constitutes the end and the beginning?
Kurt Connegut says that your should 'start [a story] as close to the end as possible'. How do you interpret this? What constitutes the end and the beginning?
You should first know your story well and planned out and not go rushing in and start writing it straight away. In short in order to write a good story you need to know your story well - the area, the feelings created. You need to put yourself in the characters shoes and imagine about how you would react.
Thank you for the quote!
Tej
Thank you, all!
If you have the story ready in your head (or if you're really organised, sketched out on paper or word-processor), then you commence the story 80% of the way through and you bring in all the previous details, that can be an interesting tool.
For example, there has to be something to drive all the characters in the story, good or bad, but if you spend a long time dealing with how each of them got to be in the place they're at, the reader may become bored or confused. So to have them all in the room with weapons trained on each other in the opening chapter, followed by some dialogue and development, then going back to why A is there and maybe B, can be very interesting. Then you move on with the story a little and perhaps bring in C and D's motivations. In this way you can still achieve Adrian's description of plot and character development.
This gets the reader/viewer engaged more quickly and effectively some of the time, but it is like a sugar-rush. If you do too much of it the result is sickness. So as Paul states above follow your own star.
If you get the chance to view the film 'Memento' this is a brilliant use of the cinema, in that the scenes show back wards; so the final scene is shown first and it ends with the first scene. Contrary to my own expectations it still made a good, thrilling movie. With the DVD version, you can run the scenes in complete forward order and it still makes total sense, but the character development is quite different.
Cheers.
PabloJ