In the Beginning: Doubling Down

By Gregory Frost

This is what I have come to believe over time, and what I tell students in writing classes:

Every story you write has two beginnings.

The first one is the one you write to get yourself into the story. It might be anything from paragraphs of telling yourself all about the character, or the conflict, or the situation; it might be all the backfill of information that you need to know in order to dive in; it might be a freewriting exercise, fast and furious and probably comprehensib...