Become an FWR Annual Member and join this class/event (and others) for 10% off! Member promo code must be applied at registration.

Writing the first pages of your novel (or short story) is one of the trickiest things to master. You’ve got to grab the reader’s attention, establish the unique world of your book, and introduce your characters, all without overwhelming the reader with too many details. It’s no wonder that so many seminars and craft books focus on how to write a bang-up beginning. But what if I were to tell you that the beginning of a novel should be closely connected to the way the story ends?

In this two-session class, we’ll spend the first week tackling the question: What makes a compelling opening? We’ll study the opening chapters of several well-known novels across different genres, investigating what they have in common. We’ll read what famous authors have to say about how to open a story. We’ll share and analyze our own opening pages.

In the second week, we’ll turn the same sort of focused attention to the way stories end. We’ll read and study examples. We’ll discuss the vital connection between beginnings and endings. Together we’ll try writing a few different alternative endings to our stories. By then, you should have a clearer idea of where your story should begin . . .and where it should end.

Cynthia Hand is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels, including the Unearthly trilogy, The Last Time We Say Goodbye, The Afterlife of Holly Chase, and The How & The Why. She also writes the Jane books with fellow authors Jodi Meadows and Brodi Ashton, including My Lady Jane, which was recently released as a television series on AmazonPrime. Before turning to young adult and genre fiction, she studied literary fiction and earned both an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. in fiction writing. She has been teaching fiction, poetry, and screenwriting at the university level from more than twenty years. Currently she teaches a novel-writing cohort in the PocketMFA program. She resides in Idaho with her husband and daughter, two cats, one crazy dog, and a mountain of books.