The first 500 words

At our writer's circle meeting last Wednesday evening we had a guest speaker who talked about writing short stories for women's magazines.  When she'd finished her talk the group had the opportunity to read out the first 500 words of a story and get feedback on it.  Her talk got me thinking about the starts of some of the SF stories I've read.

Our speaker said that her favourite two ways to start a story were with dialogue, or straight into the action.  But many SF stories I've read have confusing prologues; long log entries that make no sense to the reader, or flashbacks to a situation the reader knows nothing about.  They're as far away from starting a story with a bang as you can get.

I was beginning to despair that a straightforwardly-written SF story would ever get published.  Then I received my copy of the British Science Fiction Association's short story nomination booklet.  I sat down to read the stories, and rejoiced. Apart from one, they were straightforward narratives.  It seems that there's still hope for the simple narrative.

I read Nnedi Okorafor's Binti, a story about a young woman choosing to leave family obligations and ties and take up an offered university place on another planet.  The start of the story is action.  Binti is secretly leaving her family in the dead of night to catch a shuttle off-planet.  I was immediately sucked into what is a clever story examining family ties and racial prejudice, both between humans and between humans and aliens.

A second nominated story, Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight, by Aliette de Bodard, begins immediately after a funeral, with two siblings struggling to come to terms with the death of their powerful mother.  As the story unfolds the reader realises that the sister, who is berating the brother for not coping with his loss, has her own loss demons she must face.  It's an unfolding story which involves and sweeps the reader along with it.

There are still too many stories out there for my liking with fancy structures and meaningless openings, but these straightforwardly written ones were the stories nominated for the awards.  They had strong linear structures of the kind I like to write, where the first 500 words make sense and are truly part of the story.  So I'm feeling hopeful about my stories again.