Blog
The Art of the Start: an Interview with Kyle Minor
by Writing Workshops Staff
4 months ago
Often the opening lines of a story, essay, memoir, or novel are the defining factor that captures a reader’s attention—or loses it entirely. Enter Kyle Minor, a master storyteller whose work has been published by Esquire, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review, three volumes of the Best American series, and whose accolades include the prestigious Story Prize Spotlight Award.
And now, WritingWorkshops.com is thrilled to present Kyle's new class, The Art of the Start: How to Write Powerful Openings in Any Genre, an immersive Zoom seminar.
In this upcoming seminar, Minor distills his extensive expertise into an essential guide for writers eager to transform their beginnings from ordinary to extraordinary. Participants will dive into the intricacies of the writer-reader contract, learning how to seamlessly balance essential information with narrative momentum.
What makes a beginning truly unforgettable? How can writers strike the perfect balance between orienting readers and propelling them into the story? These are the questions Minor addresses, providing insights that are both profound and practical. With a focus on clarity and impact, this seminar promises to equip writers with the tools needed to craft openings that resonate and endure.
Whether you’re a seasoned author or an aspiring writer, The Art of the Start offers a comprehensive toolkit to elevate your openings, ensuring they captivate readers from the very first sentence. Don’t miss this chance to enhance your narrative skills with one of the literary world’s most accomplished voices.
In this upcoming seminar, Minor distills his extensive expertise into an essential guide for writers eager to transform their beginnings from ordinary to extraordinary. Participants will dive into the intricacies of the writer-reader contract, learning how to seamlessly balance essential information with narrative momentum.
What makes a beginning truly unforgettable? How can writers strike the perfect balance between orienting readers and propelling them into the story? These are the questions Minor addresses, providing insights that are both profound and practical. With a focus on clarity and impact, this seminar promises to equip writers with the tools needed to craft openings that resonate and endure.
Whether you’re a seasoned author or an aspiring writer, The Art of the Start offers a comprehensive toolkit to elevate your openings, ensuring they captivate readers from the very first sentence. Don’t miss this chance to enhance your narrative skills with one of the literary world’s most accomplished voices.
Waiting Workshops: Kyle, your seminar focuses on the writer-reader contract established at the beginning of a story. Can you elaborate on what this contract entails and why it's so crucial for writers to understand?
Kyle Minor: So many things are happening all at once at the beginning of a story. The reader wants the ride to start, but the reader also needs to have some sense of how to read. Who is telling this story? Why are they telling it? Are they speaking from within the moment, or are they reflecting upon the past? What kinds of powers does the speaker have? Can we inhabit the minds of other people? When and where are we in space and time? What preoccupies the speaker about this story? Are there special ground rules we need to know in order to understand what's going on? Are we on Mars? Do we believe in magic?
That's a lot for a story to juggle, let alone an opening. So how do we make these decisions? How do we signal to the reader that the reader is in good hands, so the reader can fall into the story instead of feeling like he or she is doing the work the writer should have been doing? All of these things are questions that the opening begins to answer, for good or for ill.
WW: One of the key benefits of your seminar is learning strategies for managing information without sacrificing speed and forward motion. Can you give us a sneak peek into one or two of these strategies and how they can transform a story's opening?
KM: Here's one: What is the minimum amount of information that the speaker should offer?
One answer goes like this: What are the things that the speaker knows, which the reader also might need to know, in order to understand what is happening right now in the way the speaker understands it? That's a good place to start.
WW: You’ve mentioned that your seminar will cover how to make all the important writerly choices while crafting an opening. What are some common mistakes writers make in their openings, and how will your seminar help them avoid these pitfalls?
KM: One common mistake is to start in the middle of the action, but without any context, which means the reader has to go back and read the opening again, after the context has been offered, instead of just moving forward out of all the good momentum that opening should have generated.
Here is another: To offer twenty pages of "information dumping" before anything happens at all.
By the way, sometimes stories work even though they do these things. So these are not hard and fast rules. They're things to think about while making choices about openings.
WW: Your seminar promises to teach how to create openings that make the reader want to keep reading. Can you share an example from your own work or a well-known piece of literature that exemplifies a powerful opening, and explain what makes it effective?
KM: Here's one, the opening sentence to Brady Udall's novel The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint:
"If I could tell you one thing about my life, it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head."
Nothing has happened in the story yet, but we know with great clarity what it is we're in for, or at least some of it, and now we want to know the rest. We know who is speaking, and why his story is the most important thing in the world to him. And then, for the next four hundred pages, the novel delivers on that promise.
WW: Given your successful publishing history and awards for your writing, what unique insights or techniques do you bring to this seminar that writers might not find elsewhere?
KM: I don't think that I have anything to say that a lot of writers don't already know. I think the one strength I might have as a teacher is an ability to take things that are usually offered in grand abstractions and offer them in plain English. I'm a working writer, and my orientation is a practical one. I'm looking for tools I can use to make my work more interesting and more insightful than it might have been without those tools. That's really all these classes can offer, at their best. The rest of the good stuff -- the material, the voice, the work -- is the business of the writer.
WW: Interactive learning and personalized feedback are key components of your seminar. How will these elements be structured, and what can participants expect in terms of interaction and feedback during the course?
KM: Well, this is a one-day seminar, so it's mostly just me talking and showing you things. But we'll take time at the end to have a conversation, pursue questions together, and so on. The last few times we did this, we promised ninety minutes, but the conversation was so interesting that most of us stayed longer.
WW: For writers of different genres—stories, essays, memoirs, and novels—are there universal principles for crafting compelling beginnings, or do you tailor your advice to each specific genre? How will your seminar address these differences?
KM: I think it's like this: If you're writing in a world of magic, then we probably need to know it pretty soon. If we're on Mars, we might wonder how people are breathing up there. If we're traveling through time, then we probably need to get to some news about time travel before too long. If we're in a fable or a fairy tale, a little bit of once upon a time language goes a long way. If our narrator is a big liar, probably best to open with a big lie. If the world is made of dental implements, the first sentence is a good place to complain about how sharp they can be. All of these things are part of the contract, the handshake, the writer is making with the reader. Different handshakes mean different things, so it's good to think about which handshake is the right handshake.
*******
Avoid the waitlist and sign up for Kyle Minor's upcoming class: The Art of the Start: How to Write Powerful Openings in Any Genre.
Instructor Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award. His work appears online and in print in Esquire, The Atlantic, Iowa Review, Story, the New York Times Book Review, and three volumes of the Best American series. Sarabande Books will publish a new collection of essays, How to Disappear and Why, in August 2024.
Kyle Minor: So many things are happening all at once at the beginning of a story. The reader wants the ride to start, but the reader also needs to have some sense of how to read. Who is telling this story? Why are they telling it? Are they speaking from within the moment, or are they reflecting upon the past? What kinds of powers does the speaker have? Can we inhabit the minds of other people? When and where are we in space and time? What preoccupies the speaker about this story? Are there special ground rules we need to know in order to understand what's going on? Are we on Mars? Do we believe in magic?
That's a lot for a story to juggle, let alone an opening. So how do we make these decisions? How do we signal to the reader that the reader is in good hands, so the reader can fall into the story instead of feeling like he or she is doing the work the writer should have been doing? All of these things are questions that the opening begins to answer, for good or for ill.
WW: One of the key benefits of your seminar is learning strategies for managing information without sacrificing speed and forward motion. Can you give us a sneak peek into one or two of these strategies and how they can transform a story's opening?
KM: Here's one: What is the minimum amount of information that the speaker should offer?
One answer goes like this: What are the things that the speaker knows, which the reader also might need to know, in order to understand what is happening right now in the way the speaker understands it? That's a good place to start.
WW: You’ve mentioned that your seminar will cover how to make all the important writerly choices while crafting an opening. What are some common mistakes writers make in their openings, and how will your seminar help them avoid these pitfalls?
KM: One common mistake is to start in the middle of the action, but without any context, which means the reader has to go back and read the opening again, after the context has been offered, instead of just moving forward out of all the good momentum that opening should have generated.
Here is another: To offer twenty pages of "information dumping" before anything happens at all.
By the way, sometimes stories work even though they do these things. So these are not hard and fast rules. They're things to think about while making choices about openings.
WW: Your seminar promises to teach how to create openings that make the reader want to keep reading. Can you share an example from your own work or a well-known piece of literature that exemplifies a powerful opening, and explain what makes it effective?
KM: Here's one, the opening sentence to Brady Udall's novel The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint:
"If I could tell you one thing about my life, it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head."
Nothing has happened in the story yet, but we know with great clarity what it is we're in for, or at least some of it, and now we want to know the rest. We know who is speaking, and why his story is the most important thing in the world to him. And then, for the next four hundred pages, the novel delivers on that promise.
WW: Given your successful publishing history and awards for your writing, what unique insights or techniques do you bring to this seminar that writers might not find elsewhere?
KM: I don't think that I have anything to say that a lot of writers don't already know. I think the one strength I might have as a teacher is an ability to take things that are usually offered in grand abstractions and offer them in plain English. I'm a working writer, and my orientation is a practical one. I'm looking for tools I can use to make my work more interesting and more insightful than it might have been without those tools. That's really all these classes can offer, at their best. The rest of the good stuff -- the material, the voice, the work -- is the business of the writer.
WW: Interactive learning and personalized feedback are key components of your seminar. How will these elements be structured, and what can participants expect in terms of interaction and feedback during the course?
KM: Well, this is a one-day seminar, so it's mostly just me talking and showing you things. But we'll take time at the end to have a conversation, pursue questions together, and so on. The last few times we did this, we promised ninety minutes, but the conversation was so interesting that most of us stayed longer.
WW: For writers of different genres—stories, essays, memoirs, and novels—are there universal principles for crafting compelling beginnings, or do you tailor your advice to each specific genre? How will your seminar address these differences?
KM: I think it's like this: If you're writing in a world of magic, then we probably need to know it pretty soon. If we're on Mars, we might wonder how people are breathing up there. If we're traveling through time, then we probably need to get to some news about time travel before too long. If we're in a fable or a fairy tale, a little bit of once upon a time language goes a long way. If our narrator is a big liar, probably best to open with a big lie. If the world is made of dental implements, the first sentence is a good place to complain about how sharp they can be. All of these things are part of the contract, the handshake, the writer is making with the reader. Different handshakes mean different things, so it's good to think about which handshake is the right handshake.
*******
Avoid the waitlist and sign up for Kyle Minor's upcoming class: The Art of the Start: How to Write Powerful Openings in Any Genre.
Instructor Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award. His work appears online and in print in Esquire, The Atlantic, Iowa Review, Story, the New York Times Book Review, and three volumes of the Best American series. Sarabande Books will publish a new collection of essays, How to Disappear and Why, in August 2024.
