Consider this quotation from Saunders’s story “Victory Lap” in Tenth of Dec, “Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs. Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned.” These are the first sentences of the story.

They are good first sentences for several reasons. They suggest an ongoing process (“Three days shy . . .”) or two (Alison has paused) and readers are likely to read on to see how the process(es) resolves. In other words, the sentences presents portents of a possible future. Will the portents be fulfilled?

Another reason these are good first sentences is that they also characterize. Beginning with a character is likely to interest readers, especially if a connection to that character is likely or at least possible. I’ve had a fifteenth birthday, and I’ve even paused at the top of stairs and imagined that my surroundings might be different.

These two strategies are good ways to start stories.

Notice also this moment from the title story, “Tenth of December.” In it a boy is crossing a frozen lake. The ice under his feet has been making odd sounds as he imagines a conversation with a girl he knows. Readers are deep within his point of view or consciousness and have been for several paragraphs.

Maybe you should turn back, Suzanne said.

But wasn’t this feeling of fear the exact feeling all heroes had to confront early in life? Wasn’t overcoming this feeling of fear what truly distinguished the brave?

There could be no turning back.

Or could there? Maybe there could. Actually there should.

The ice gave way and the boy fell through.

The last sentence is a surprise (or it was for me) partly because of its suddenness. It isn’t telegraphed by a word like “suddenly,” for example. It is its own paragraph in a series of short paragraphs, one with dramatically different contents. But another part of what makes the last sentence a surprise is the quick movement from the character’s inner life to an external, objective, cinematic point of view. Readers flash from within the character’s decision making, his deliberations about his own safety, to a flat description of consequences. As much as those consequences may have been anticipated, seeing them on the page is surprising.

We might try similar strategies when we seek to surprise readers.

These prompts are inspired by Ted Gioia’s “My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character.” I’ve revised his techniques to create fictional characters.

1. What childhood experiences formed your character? List three and write a paragraph about each.
2. How do they handle their time and material resources? What do they do with their free time? What sorts of things do they surround themselves with?
3. Identify what irritates your character the most about others. (This may be the trait or flaw they dislike most in themselves.)
4. Describe your character’s long-term relationship(s) so that it reveals what the character longs for and what they think they deserve or will settle for.
5. How does your character treat people assigned to serve them, especially people who have no power or influence over them?
6. Does your character cheat at small things? (Why would or wouldn’t that guarantee they will cheat at big things?)
7. How do they handle unexpected problems? Do they exacerbate the issue (intentionally or not), try to ignore it, negotiate, or attempt a solution alone or with others?
8. Describe the character’s inner conflict. What do they want? What will they not do to get it?

I’m enjoying At the Mouth of the River of Bees, one of Kij Johnson’s short story collections. I plan to go looking for more of her work. Consider this sentence from her story “26 monkeys, also the abyss”:

These are some ways Aimee’s life might’ve come apart:

After this sentence is a short list of three or four events which, it is clear, did not happen to Aimee. This list of things that did not happen is a kind of narrative negative space but not on the level of the page. It’s not an empty or unoccupied area around paragraphs, at the ends or beginnings of them, or a gap between sets of them. It’s an empty narrative space because it is an explicit list of things that did not occur in the character’s life. But telling readers what is not there kind of implies what is. It’s characterization by what has not happened to a character. What hasn’t happened also suggests the kind of person Aimee is. I’ll probably try this technique by suggesting what could have happened to a character, but didn’t.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Johnson’s novel The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.

Consider the last two paragraphs of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna:

She, Mika Moon, would not be the witch who transformed the world, but she was making it a little better, day by day. She had once believed witches would never have friendship, community, and each other, but here they were. She had once believed she would never have a family, but here they were, too. She, who had once believed she would never leave a mark on anybody, knew now that the marks she had left were unerasable, as much a part of forever as the sea.

And, really, who could ask for more than that?

Endings are tricky. No one strategy will fit all of them, but this ending works really well. The techniques behind it include a summary of the book in this paragraph (the scenes that make up the book are excellent in themselves as well), anaphora, and epistrophe. The length and variety of the sentences keep the anaphora interesting: “She . . . ,” “She had once . . . ,” “She had once . . . ,” and “She . . . knew now . . .” The same is true of the epistrophe: “but here they were” and “but here they were, too.” Prose writers worry about repetition, but these strategies succeeded in creating emphasis and emotions as the book ends (at least for me). Consider trying them.