Synchronicity & Juxtaposition: Dramatically Setting Your Flash in Motion
“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...” ~Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Hi friends, I spent this past weekend in Geneva, where I taught a workshop to the lovely folks from the Geneva Writers Group, and had an absolute blast. A really engaged, enthusiastic, talented bunch of writers! Many thanks to Christine Breede for the kind invitation.
I was thinking that we writing instructors often talk about the importance of opening sentences, giving great reasons for this and general tips, but we’re often not specific. For today’s post, I’d like to offer a specific type of opening you might try, which conveys in a single sentence two simultaneous “events.”
This immediately lends a feeling of significance for the story you’re about to tell. It indicates this day is special. Surely what follows has never happened before. It’s a great way to engage your reader right away. Today’s prompt will show you how to do this…
I’m reminded of the iconic first sentence to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, which, hmm, admittedly doesn’t show two simultaneous events, but rather juxtaposes a moment with a memory. Note the fascinating use of time:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice“
“I have been through some of his works with a fine-tooth comb, and marked sentences according to whether they refer to future or past, and I have been not entirely surprised by the pattern that emerged, of future-past, future-past, future-past . . . the forward-back, forward-back of a ticking metronome. Just as he does in that first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, often García Márquez writes as if there were a kind of parity to past and future, almost as if there were no forward arrow of time at all.” ~Claire Adam, Literary Hub
Of course I went down a rabbit hole with this! Read more this excellent analysis of this iconic opening sentence by Claire Adam at Literary Hub.
But what is “synchronicity” exactly?
Synchronicity: “The simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”
Here’s an example from the opening line of Check Your Risk Level by Tara Stillions Whitehead:
“Shoshona got her period the day after the Fallbrook Fire erupted east of highway 15 and incinerated hundreds of acres of pot and palm tree farms.”
And another, from The Fractal Geometry of Grief, by Jolene McIlwain (not precisely simultaneous, but within a specified time frame):
“Hubert Ashe fell in love with the doe in August, four months after his wife passed.”
YOUR PROMPT
This is a prompt I have given before which tends to work well.