Beginnings

Authors have agonized over beginnings since, probably, the beginning of storytelling itself. The start of a traditionally structured story must serve many purposes all at once: it introduces one or more characters, sets them in a certain place and time, establishes any number of reader expectations about style and substance, and starts a chain of action that will hopefully carry through until the final chapter--and all of it has to grab the reader before he or she abandons the work in favor of something else.

Blog-novelists who structure their stories with deliberate beginnings, middles, and endings have the additional challenge of having to do all of this in a single take, because substantial revision to a blog-novel in progress is difficult or impossible. In this way, blog-novels cross the written word with live storytelling.

We recommend that blog-novelists take the time to plan and plot their blog-novels before posting a first entry that will be, essentially, written in stone. Looking back now on the opening week of our blog-novel, "Giant Girl Rampages," it feels like we were hopelessly ill-prepared for putting the first episodes on the web, even though we pre-wrote the first five days and had rough plots ready for the next three months.

Blog-novelists coming from the world of books, especially, need to prepare for a little disappointment when looking back on earlier parts of the story. As with all first drafts, your main character's voice will evolve as she takes on a life of her own and the plot will develop layers and meanders you never expected. You will feel the urge to go back and revise--and you won't be able to. With the blog-novel, any substantial amount of retroactive editing will be impossible, but what you get instead is the constant prod to make forward progress.

The beginning of a blog-novel should be a clearly intentional beginning that works toward a clearly-intended ending, or else what you're writing isn't a blog-novel, but instead something called a character blog--which is perfectly fine if that's what you want to do. Your open-ended character blog will also require some pre-planning though, because you'll need to know something about your character and story world before you start.

In Week #1 of "Giant Girl Rampages," readers meet Melly Mills and learn about her unusual size, her background, and her personality. We describe an important event that has turned Melly's world upside-down, with aftershocks and unforseen consequences that will continue to unfold for months to come. We introduce Dr. Crisp and other key people in Melly's life, reveal her aspiration to meet and fall in love with a boy who is even taller than she is, show her reading habits, and witness her introduction to a sport that will play an important part in the story. That structured beginning gave us a platform on which to build the rest of our story.

If we continue GGR long enough, and if we don't end up abandoning it in the middle, it will wrap up in a nice, neat, clearly intentional ending. It may not be exactly the ending we had in mind when we started the project, because stories tend to take on a life of their own, but for a blog-novel, just as with a paper novel, it's important to have an ending in mind from the very beginning.