Meet the Teaching Artist: National Book Award Nominee Samantha Mabry on Opening Lines and Atmospheric Wonder
by Writing Workshops Staff
3 weeks ago
In the unforgiving ecosystem of contemporary publishing, where agents receive hundreds of queries weekly and readers abandon books within pages, the opening lines of a novel carry an almost impossible burden. They must seduce, startle, and sustain, all while establishing the delicate alchemy of tone and tension that will propel a reader through hundreds of pages yet to come.
It's a craft that Samantha Mabry has mastered with surgical precision across four critically acclaimed novels, including All the Wind in the World, which earned her a National Book Award nomination, and Tigers, Not Daughters, which Lionsgate optioned for film after its pages conjured both ghostly presence and sisterly discord with haunting immediacy.
Mabry's own relationship with beginnings is deeply personal. Her novels emerge not from character or plot, she explains, but from place—the parched landscapes of the Southwest, the poisonous gardens of South Texas, the liminal spaces where magical realism blooms from cultural memory. It's a sensibility shaped by her grandmother Garcia's ritual of washing money to cleanse it of bad spirits, the kind of inherited magic that Mabry transforms into literary gold on her first pages. Her work operates at the intersection of the mystical and the urgent, where environmental collapse meets teenage heartbreak, where family ghosts refuse to stay buried.
But Mabry's expertise extends beyond her own acclaimed fiction. As a lecturer at Southern Methodist University, she witnesses daily the struggle of emerging writers to bridge the gap between academic precision and creative vulnerability. Her dual perspective, as both National Book Award nominee and classroom instructor, has crystallized her understanding of what makes opening pages succeed or fail. She's learned to be economical in her expectations, demanding that every word justify its presence and that every sentence serve the story rather than the writer's ego.
This hard-won wisdom forms the foundation of her upcoming three-week workshop, Opening Lines, Tone, and Tension, where she promises to dissect the mechanics of literary seduction. Through close readings of writers like Karen Russell and Barbara Kingsolver, alongside innovative texts like Jordan Peele's Nope and the podcast S-Town, Mabry will guide participants through the delicate process of crafting first pages that agents and editors cannot ignore. It's a masterclass born from both triumph and revision, including her own painful discovery that the opening pages she'd cherished for All the Wind in the World needed to be cut entirely, buried somewhere in the middle of what became her published novel.
For writers who have struggled to capture attention in those crucial first 250 words, Mabry offers the confidence that comes from understanding exactly what those words need to accomplish, and why.
Writing Workshops: Your novels blend magical realism with distinctly Southwestern settings. In your upcoming workshop on opening lines and tension, how will you help writers create that same immediate sense of atmospheric wonder that makes your first pages so captivating?
Samantha Mabry: I'm obsessed with setting. Often writers get asked the question, "What comes first, plot or character?" and, for me, it's always setting. I can't really "world-build" a non-existent place, so I do have to know in pretty full detail the place I'm writing about in order to have a sense of the kind of people who would live there, how they would grow up there, and what kind of tensions might sprout from there. I'm very well aware that not all writers or genres need this kind of attention to detail when it comes to setting, but I think that knowing, even in the early pages (or even early planning stages), how setting works into either the background or foreground of your characters and plot can add so much depth to a story.
Writing Workshops: You've mentioned your grandmother Garcia washing money to rinse off "bad spirits" as an influence on your magical thinking. How do you guide students to mine their own family histories and cultural backgrounds to discover authentic magical elements that can elevate their opening pages?
Samantha Mabry: First of all, you have to be willing to mine your family history and cultural background. Some writers are into doing this, others not so much. Sort of like with setting, I have an obsession with history and find a person's history to be inextricable from their core being, especially if they're trying to escape their history. This sort of goes back to what I was saying about planning. There are things that you know about your character that your reader will never know and/or never need to know. So, a character's family history, their cultural background, their hometown, etc. will influence them in ways that may or may not make it to the page. You will know about all of these things, but what do you need to get down that is absolutely essential? What will best serve the story?
Writing Workshops: In Tigers, Not Daughters, you masterfully establish both the ghostly presence of Ana and the distinct personalities of her sisters within the first few pages. What specific techniques will you teach in your workshop to help writers introduce multiple characters while maintaining narrative tension?
Samantha Mabry: When I first started drafting Tigers, Not Daughters, I was way more interested in the ghost than I was in the sisters. Specifically, I was trying to figure out what the ghost of Ana wanted—like, ghosts have to haunt for some reason, but I couldn't really figure out why this ghost was returning to its home and what it was trying to achieve. This had me stuck for a very long time. It wasn't until I flipped the way I was thinking about things that the novel really started to come to life. I realized that it doesn't really matter what the ghost wants—it's not a real person!—but it matters a whole lot what each of the sisters want from the ghost. So, when I was able to create very clear differences in what the sisters wanted from the ghost of their sister, the story really took shape, and the voices of the characters became distinctive. This all seems so obvious in hindsight, but sometimes, as writers, we tend to get stuck on what we think our story should be about that we never consider what will actually make it work. Sometimes we can figure all this out ourselves with time, but sometimes it takes an outside reader or two to give us a nudge in a better, more workable direction.
Writing Workshops: As both a lecturer at SMU and a National Book Award-nominated author, you navigate both academic and creative writing worlds. How has your teaching experience shaped your approach to opening scenes, especially when working with students who may be transitioning from academic to creative writing?
Samantha Mabry: I have become very economical in my expectations of my college students and their academic essays. For example, they need to get to the point quickly. They need to be engaging but also essential with their wording. They should neither repeat themselves nor go off on a tangent. Their quotes should be well-chosen and absolutely perfect for the occasion. I admire this in creative writing as well. My favorite books of late are short with urgent, hard-hitting prose—Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, for example. They don't even need to have much of a plot if the sentences are good and a well-constructed paragraph can cause me to gasp out loud. Again, the word that keeps popping into my head is essential. If someone chooses to crack open your book, they are gifting you with their time, and that is so precious. If you can show that reader right off the bat that you are good at your craft, then they are more likely to not DNF you. All that said, I also love big, meandering books like The Gentleman in Moscow, so if you write like Amor Towles, you can do whatever you want, and you probably don't need me!
Writing Workshops: Your Reading the 100 newsletter on Substack demonstrates your deep engagement with literary classics. Will your workshop include analysis of first pages from these canonical works alongside contemporary examples like Karen Russell and Jordan Peele's Nope? What can writers learn from comparing these different approaches?
Samantha Mabry: You know, I was an English major, and the thought of deep-dive analyzing those canonical works sometimes sends me back to those "required reading" days, and I get a little flustered and intimidated. We may look at something from Daphne DuMaurier, but she was always considered to work right on the line between "popular" and "literary," which is where I like to work as well and where I see myself as a writer. I don't know if the canon accepts her because it sees her as nothing more than a "romance writer," which is not even true. I think that we could have a discussion about a writer's intention and a reader's expectations, and how to balance those, or if to balance those.
Writing Workshops: You've described writing as both joyous and frustrating and mentioned sharing your editor's notes with students to demonstrate the revision process. How extensively will your workshop cover the evolution of first pages through editing, and what's your advice for writers who become too attached to their original openings?
Samantha Mabry: Basically, I thought my original opening pages for All the Wind in the World were the opening pages up until the second or third round of pass pages between me and my editor, at which point she suggested I cut maybe the first two and a half to three pages to what the opening lines were when the book went to print. What ended up being the opening paragraphs were actually in the first chapter; they were just buried in the middle. I feel like my editor was probably trying to nudge me in this direction the whole time and have me figure out this cut for myself, but I stubbornly never "saw the light." In the end what I realized was that I was writing that original beginning for myself instead of writing it for the story. In other words, the question writers should ask themselves all the time—not just for the opening pages, but with every line, chapter, whatever—is if these words serve you as a writer, or if they serve the story. Just because those original opening lines served to orient you the writer into the story, doesn't mean they are necessary to orient the reader.
Writing Workshops: Environmental themes run through all your novels, from the poisonous garden in A Fierce and Subtle Poison to the drought-stricken landscape in All the Wind in the World. What guidance will you offer writers on establishing setting as an active force in their opening pages rather than mere backdrop?
Samantha Mabry: Okay, so again: it all boils down to whether or not setting needs to be an "active force" in your story. For me and my stories: yes! For others, maybe not? Maybe the tension comes from some other element. You have to find out where the tension comes from in your story (and you can't just say that it comes from everywhere!) and lean in hard with that tension-point from the get-go.
Writing Workshops: Your pandemic experience influenced elements of Clever Creatures of the Night, including encounters with wild hogs that inspired aspects of the novel. How will your workshop address incorporating real-world disruptions and unexpected experiences into creating narrative tension from the very first page?
Samantha Mabry: I love that you used the word "disruption." I don't think that every novel has to begin with a "disruptive" element, but I sure love those that do. I love a quiet disruption (like, a stranger arrives in a new town) and loud disruption (like a major apocalyptic event). I'm going to fly back to the point I think I hinted at in one of the earlier questions, which is whether or not an opening page is doing what you think it is doing. You may think you're describing some big dramatic moment, but are you? Does that tension just exist in your head? Sometimes you need some help figuring that out. I know I did.
Learn more about Samantha's upcoming three-week workshop, Opening Lines, Tone, and Tension, and sign up before all the seats are filled.
Instructor Samantha Mabry is the critically-acclaimed author of four novels for young adults, including A Fierce and Subtle Poison (2016), All the Wind in the World, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2017, Tigers, Not Daughters (2020), which, in addition to winning both the Reading the West Award and the Writers League of Texas Award, was optioned for film by Lionsgate Productions, and, most recently, Clever Creatures of the Night (2024). Samantha hosts a newsletter about reading the top 100 novels of the century, as recently chosen by The Atlantic, called Reading the 100. Read more about Samantha in this recent profile in D Magazine.
