Occasionally, the Higher Power laughs at me.
Well, said Higher Power could *always* be laughing at me; it’s just that sometimes Thon lets me know about it.
Friday night and yesterday morning, I was toying with “Agent 009.75,” an HP/James Bond crossover in which Violet Jane Moneypenny is a third Evans sister who ends up raising Harry (with help from Bond, Q, etc.).
I wrote the first couple of scenes months ago
, and on Friday, I thought I knew what was happening next, so I sat down to write those scenes. And I did, but my gut felt…reluctant to continue. So I put it aside, and spent the rest of yesterday reading and journaling.
One of the bits that I wrote yesterday had Jane musing about how many things she needed to do now that she has Harry. Part of her musing went:
“And while beginning at the beginning and continuing until I come to the end is very good advice , finding the beginning at which to begin is…difficult.”
The same sometimes holds true for fiction writing. Where do you start the story?
One really good guideline is to begin with a character in a setting with a problem. (Think the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back: Han and Luke have to survive a deadly snowstorm on Hoth. Or the beginning of Dune: Paul is forced to abandon his home planet because of politics.) Note that the problem that begins the story isn’t necessarily the big problem that is the main focus of the story; it’s just an introduction to ease the reader into character and world.
And I did that with Jane, reporting to work one Monday, learning that the magical war is over…but her sister and brother-in-law were killed and her nephew somehow survived. She has to be sure Harry is safe.
That said, the bigger question in the story, the reason I want to write it in the first place, is: How would a Harry Potter raised (at least in part) by James Bond respond to the magical world?
Another guideline for beginnings: Begin with your main character (hereafter, MC), in thon’s perspective, with events happening to thon.
I failed miserably with Jane, since Harry is the MC. The beginning I wrote with Jane’s POV is good stuff…if I want to write a story about Jane dealing with the magical world. (You can read “dealing with” in a number of ways, and most of them would likely be correct. GRIN) But I want to write about Harry in the magical world, not Jane.
And that’s when I realized that starting with Jane sets up a situation like the one in The Magical Sentinel – wherein I write the introduction where my preferred guardians for Harry show up, and then skip ahead to Harry on the train.
A number of readers weren’t satisfied with that in The Magical Sentinel and, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it, either. So if I weren’t satisfied with it once, why would I be satisfied with it again?
(Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy those scenes with the adults in Sentinel, but the story was supposed to be Harry-centric. Ditto, to a lesser extent, Child of Iron, Goblet of Fire; a lesser extent because Tony and Harry are co-MCs, in a way.)
Clearly the scenes I wrote with Jane (and James Bond, also) are not the best beginning for this story; I don’t regret writing them, because having that sense of knowing the background will color everything else I write in that story. Those scenes just aren’t the right place to begin.
So now I’m back to feeling my way into the story, finding the proper beginning to begin at, and with a little bit of grace, I’ll be flying through the story sooner than later.
