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A writing teacher in Austin told me to kill my first paragraph, now I do it every draft
She said the real story starts where the warm-up ends, and after I stripped the first 300 words off my last short story, the prompt about a dying lighthouse finally made sense, has anyone else tried cutting the setup on a flash fiction piece?
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dixon.anthony13d ago
Wait, she actually had you delete the whole first 300 words? That's insane to me. I've heard people say trim the fat before, but that's like an entire page of work just gone. Every single time? That seems so risky, like what if your first paragraph has some key detail you need later? But I guess she's got a point about the warm-up thing, because I notice my own drafts do that too, where I'm basically just talking myself into the story. Maybe it's just me but I never thought about just killing it completely instead of moving stuff around. That lighthouse prompt sounds like a pain anyway, so maybe cutting deep is the only way to make it work.
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