The opening of any work should immediately immerse the reader into the narrative. An opening might focus primarily on character(s) and/or setting. Regardless of focus, there is a general rule of thumb when writing effective openings—in medias res—or to put it another way, just throw us right into the middle of things and give us strategic, concrete details.
Below are two narrative structures. The first more applicable to longer forms, the second from Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, more applicable to shorter forms. Notice how the longer form allows for more exposition at the start of the work where the short form, throws the reader immediately into the conflict. Though it is true that many great novels begin with a good deal of exposition, there are just as many that seem to follow the shorter form opening: throw the reader immediately into the character conflict and build the exposition along the way.
*Keep in mind that each scene within any work, long or short, follows its own similar narrative structure. So think of each scene and/or chapter as its own strategic plot contributing to the overall plot.
Opening Writing Exercise
Choose a work you’ve already written and have at least a few days away from it so that you can read it with fresh perspective. Now, read it again while looking for the moment when you feel an uptick in interest. A moment that anchors and drives you forward simultaneously. This could be for any reason: a character quirk, an extraordinary detail….
Save your work in another document so you keep your original.
Next, cut everything from the narrative prior to this “uptick” no matter how much, even if the uptick happens in the last paragraph of the work. Save this in another document.
Consider how this “uptick” moment relates to the main character and one or more character crises as well as the climax. How might you further explore the concrete details within this moment so that it subtly foreshadows the longer narrative?
As you rewrite your new opening, beginning with your “uptick” moment, consider which of your cut word count, only the essential details, are necessary to the rewrite.
As you rewrite the narrative, you’ll want to eventually consider how your new opening echoes in the conclusion and vice versa.
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Such an arrangement [syntactic] that one element of equal importance with another is similarly developed and phrased. The principle of parallelism dictates that coordinate ideas should have coordinate presentation. Within a sentence, for instance, where several elements of equal importance are to be expressed, if one element is cast in a relative clause the others should be expressed in relative clauses. Conversely, of course, the principle of parallelism demands that unequal elements should not be expressed in similar constructions. Practiced writers are not likely to attempt, for example, the comparison of positive and negative statements, of inverted and uninverted constructions of dependent and independent clauses. And, for an example of simple parallelism, the sentence immediately preceding may serve. Some departures from parallelism may qualify as “slight of ‘and,'” but most are just signs of carelessness, as when someone says, “I don’t like to fish or swimming.” But a deliberate violation of parallelism can be highly dramatic. Consider the couplet in Houseman’s “Hell Gate” in which coordinating conjunctions (polysyndeton) create the expectation of a parallel group of active verbs but abruptly end with a linked verb: “Then the sentry turned his head,/Looked, and knew me, and was Ned.” (Handbook to Literature)
Ontology is the study of being. Ontology seeks to clarify the sense (or senses) in which a thing may be said to be, or to exist, and to provide an account of the most basic categories of being. The ontology of a theory is the set of entities that exist according to the theory. The ontology of the Standard Model of particle physics, for example includes quarks. A theorist is ontologically committed to Fs if her views entail that Fs exist. So physicists who accept that Standard Model are ontologically committed to quarks. (The Norton Introduction to Nihilism)
Other Critical Theories
Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism. The dialog between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek Republic. Richter provides a nice summary of this point: “…poets may stay as servants of the state if they teach piety and virtue, but the pleasures of art are condemned as inherently corrupting to citizens…” (19)….
In Poetics, Aristotle breaks with his teacher (Plato) in the consideration of art. Aristotle considers poetry (and rhetoric), a productive science, whereas he thought logic and physics to be theoretical sciences, and ethics and politics practical sciences (Richter 38). Because Aristotle saw poetry and drama as means to an end (for example, an audience’s enjoyment) he established some basic guidelines for authors to follow to achieve certain objectives. (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)
Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
An intellectual movement utilizing the methods of structural linguistics and structural anthropology. Where linguists, such as Ferdinand de Saussure, study the underlying system of language rather than concrete speech events, and where anthropologists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss, examine cultural phenomena in terms of the underlying formal systems of which they are manifestations, structuralist literary critics, such as Roland Barthes, seek not explication of unique texts but an account of the modes of literary discourse and their operation. The border separating such study of the structures of literature from semiotics, the study of signs, is nebulous and frequently crossed. (Handbook to Literature)
New Criticism/Neo-Aristotelian (1930s-present)
In a strict sense the term applies to the criticism practices by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Clench Brooks; it is derived from Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941), which discusses a movement in America in the 1930s that paralleled movements in England led by critics such as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Epson…. Not even the group to which the term can be applied in its strictest sense has formed a school subscribing to a fixed dogma; when to this group are added others, such as Yvor Winters and Kenneth Burke, it can be seen that the New Criticism is really a cluster of attitudes toward literature rathe than an organized critical system. The primary concern of these critics has been to discover the intrinsic worth of literature…a protest against certain conventional and traditional ways of viewing life and art. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)
The emphasis in criticism on the values of symbols and language that, often unconsciously, explain meanings or unconscious intention. (Handbook to Literature)
Lacanian Criticism (1930s to present)
Language as expressing absence. You use a word to represent an absent object but you cannot make it present. The word, then, like the unconscious desire, is something that cannot be fulfilled. Language, reaching out with one word after the other, striving for but never reaching its object, is the arena of desire. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)
Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
The most insistent and vigorous historicism through most of the twentieth century has been Marxism, based on the world of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marxist criticism, like other historical critical methods in the nineteenth century, treated literature as a passive product of the culture, specifically of the economic aspect, and, therefore, of class warfare. Economics, the underlying cause of history, was thus the base, and culture, including literature and the other arts, the superstructure. Viewed from the Marxist perspective, the literary works of a period would, then, reveal the state of the struggle between classes in the historical place and moment. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)
Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
The conventional notion of reading is that a writer or speaker has an “idea,” encodes it that is, turns it into words—and the reader or listener decodes it, deriving, when successful, the writer or speaker’s “idea.” The reader-response critics assume, however, that such equivalency between sender and receiver is impossible. The literary work, there, does not exist on the page; that is only the text. The text becomes a work only when it is read, just as a score becomes music only when it is played. Eric Kandel takes this further with his theory of the “beholder’s share.” (The Norton Introduction to Literature)
Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
Like Marxist criticism, feminist criticism derives from firm political and ideological commitments and insists that literature both reflects and influences human behavior in the larger world. Feminist criticism often, too, has practiced and political aims. Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given grossly disproportionate attention to the interest, thoughts and actions of men, feminist thought endeavors both to extend contemporary attention to distinctively female concerns, ideas and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)
Ecocriticism (1960s to present)
A study of the intersections between humanity and nature including focuses on the pastoral, the frontier, gender position, ethnicities, communities, urbanites, industrialization and technology. (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)
For the deconstructionist, language consists just in black marks on a page that repeat or differ from each other and the reader is the only author, one who can find whatever can be found in, or be made to appear in, those detached, isolated marks. The deconstructionist conception of literature is thus very broad—almost any writing will do. While this may seem “subjective” in that the critical reader has great freedom, it is the object—the black marks on the blank page—that is the sole subject/object of intention/attention. Jacques Derrida, its most famous proponent, saw language and narrative as not an “answer” but rather a “journey” toward an impossible “truth.” The concept of Differance, to both defer and differ, then encourages the reader to not search for what an author intended, or even what the work intends, but rather what the reader experiences within the reading. The postmodern deconstructionist critic’s tools, therefore, are textual analysis of the black marks on the page and how they relate to other black marks on the page. In this approach, whatever the author originally experienced or intended for the work as it was written is irrelevant. The focus is on the reader’s current experience of the text as the different aspects of the text are broken down, analyzed and put back together again in order to form meaning. It might be suggested that deconstructionism is the most fundamental and widely applicable critical approach as it can be used both separately and as layered affect upon other critical approaches. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)
Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)
Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan). (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)
Critical Race Theory (1970s to present)
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice. (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)
New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault’s concept of épistème). New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the historic moment that created it. Specifically, New Historicism is “…a practice that has developed out of contemporary theory, particularly the structuralist realization that all human systems are symbolic and subject to the rules of language, and the deconstructive realization that there is no way of positioning oneself as an observer outside the closed circle of textuality” (Richter 1205). (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)
Neoformalism (1980s to present)
Heavily influenced by film critique, neoformalism suggests that art and literature seek to defamiliarize the beholder so to defamiliarize the beholder/reader within the context of the work. (Handbook to Literature)
Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized). (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)
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. Eric Kandel.
. William Harmon.
William Strunk.