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Mark David Gerson
a book bubble about
Sara's Year
Literature & Fiction
Author Insight
The Beginning Isn't Always the Beginning
Frank Littleton's experience with Sarah in his 1930s English class is one I encounter often as a writing coach: Our orderly brains always want to start every project at the beginning and work methodically toward the end. Creativity is rarely that orderly. If the writer is lucky, the beginning shows up right where it ought to: in the opening sentence of our story. Sometimes, however, it shows up later. Much later. Sometimes, it doesn't show up until the end! I was lucky with Sara's Year, luckier than my fictional Sara(h): I knew what the book's opening scene would be before I started. Yet that hasn't always been the case. With The Emmeline Papers, third book in my Sara Stories series, no opening I tried felt right...and I tried a bunch. In the end, I started the story elsewhere and found my beginning sometime later. With The MoonQuest, the opening scene of my first draft turned out to not be the opening scene of the ultimate book. With The Way of the Fool, I intentionally began somewhere in the middle because that's the part that came to me first. Frank Littleton was right: Books start for the writer wherever it is they start!
Book Excerpt
Sara's Year
“What is? What’s so difficult?” Frank Littleton strode to Sarah’s desk and peered down into her exercise book.
“Writing,” Sarah sighed. “It’s so hard.”
“Then you’re doing it wrong,” her English teacher offered gently.
“I never know where to begin.”
“Begin anywhere.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. You have to start at the beginning. That’s what beginnings are for.” Sarah looked up at her teacher. “Aren’t they?”
Tall and blond with wavy hair, a trim mustache and tortoise-shell glasses setting off sparkling, sea-blue eyes, Frank Littleton could have stepped straight out of a Hollywood picture and into Room 308. To the adolescent girls of Baron Byng whose lives revolved around the brash, dark-haired sons of Jewish immigrants, their English teacher was rare and exotic. Most had a crush on him.
“Are they?” he asked. “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“You say you have to start at the beginning, Sarah,” he continued. “Why?”
Sarah thought for a minute. “Because…because…because all books start at the beginning.”
“That’s where they start for you when you read them. What makes you think that that’s where they start for the writer?”
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