CLASS
Beginnings and the Narrative Arc
Crafting openings that provide map and meaning
March 19, 2025, 7pm EST | ZOOM
For Canadian Authors Association members
Whether your genre is memoir, creative nonfiction or fiction, writing a great beginning is one of the writer’s most difficult tasks. The opening must immediately engage the reader, while speaking to the central questions: What is the piece about and what is at stake? No matter how skilled you are, until you answer these, you lose your way. You burn through draft after draft, hoping to stumble on a strategy that unifies the morass of detail you’ve created. A well-crafted beginning can serve as a narrative roadmap, providing the elements you need to navigate your story to its deepest intent.
After a quick overview of story structure, we will investigate how the narrative arc reveals itself in beginnings, using a micro-fiction by Steve Almond. Through writing exercises, we’ll create our own beginnings—ones we will mine for narrative potential to point us to work that is purposeful and coherent.
LUCIAN CHILDS is a fiction writer whose debut novel, Dreaming Home (Biblioasis 2023), won the Fred Kerner Book Award and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction. He was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Award. He is a contributing editor of the Lambda Literary finalist, Building Fires in the Snow: a collection of Alaska LGBTQ short fiction and poetry. His stories and reviews have appeared in the journals Grain, The Puritan, Plenitude and Prairie Fire, among others.