How to Begin a Story With a Technique from Stephenie Meyer, Author of Twilight

How to Begin a Story With a Technique from Stephenie Meyer, Author of Twilight

Beginning stories and novels is always a challenge. Most beginnings are discarded eventually. Often, these ignoble starts bear no resemblance to the final product. This difficulty is, I believe, a direct result of the writer having an unclear idea of the story and of the characters who will populate their imaginary world. Stephanie Meyer, the highly successful author of the ‘Twilight’ series, offers a tip in the way that she began her first novel.

Stephenie’s experience of beginning Twilight can be used to a writer’s advantage when starting a new story or novel project. Stephenie, who had written very little and had no great ambition as a writer prior to the amazing success of Twilight, did not sit down initially to write a bestselling coming-of-age vampire novel series. She was a reader, a sporadic writer, and fan of the “vampire-genre” and of the “romance-genre”. Her compelling story that becomes ‘Twilight’ begins with a dream she had one night. This dream will eventually become the ‘meadow scene’ in her first book where Bella Swan, in the forest with Edward Cullen, discovers Edward is a vampire. This is a powerful, key scene in the novel, and Stephenie has described how jolted she was by the images in the dream. Stephenie awoke and wrote the dream down, and this became the key scene the entire book was written around.

We all have dreams and flashes of scenes and characters from time to time, but what Stephenie did with this dream is something that writers can use to begin to craft a story. Stephenie wrote outward from the key scene she devised from her dream to answer the questions posed by the scene:

Who were the two people in the dream/scene – a human girl and a handsome vampire?
And, why would she willingly give herself to him?

These two questions make up the key components of the story, and in answering them, Stephenie is drawing her readers into a detailed world where vampires and humans exist throughout a long history.

How to use what Stephenie did with Twilight

1. Begin with a compelling image or character.

2. Free-write the scene you imagine, or as much detail as you can about the character that you see/imagine.

3. Step back and answer some questions about what you have written:

What came before this scene?
What is important about this scene and how did the character get to this place or in this situation?
Why does this particular scene matter to the character that is there?
What could make this scene or situation worse or complicate the issue or event?
What is the natural outcome of the event, and, what is the least likely outcome?

The key takeaway from what Stephenie did with Twilight is to find a compelling scene and then to seek to answer the questions about who is there and what is going on. You write both forward and backwards from the event, trying to give it a realistic (regardless of genre) past that got you to that point, and future, that the story and characters will inexorably move towards.

You may not know exactly where the story will end, but if you begin with a vivid character or scene you can write around it to tell a compelling story.

Try this technique on a short-story and see how it works. I’d love to hear how it comes out. Send me an email at info@colewriting.com and let me know how it went if you try this exercise.