Free. Open to the Public. Led by John Copenhaver, author of DODGING AND BURNING.
From The First Page: Strategies for Crafting Compelling Openings in Fiction
In today’s marketplace, especially for debut writers, a beautifully crafted opening to a novel or a short story must accomplish three things: It must intrigue readers, it must orient them in the narrative, and it must establish the tone and mood for the piece. Beyond the title, blurbs, or jacket copy, those first few sentences and paragraphs determine if a reader is going to read on. In this workshop, we’ll discuss all that must be communicated in those first pages, look at examples from various genres that model superb openings in different ways, and then do a brief exercise to get us thinking about how to implement these strategies in our own writing.