It seems so easy to start a story: just move your pen to the paper or hit the keys on the keyboard. That’s just how you put words on paper, though. To start your own story, within your own world, you’ll have to truly inhabit it. I do, at least.

I’ve been writing for a long time, yet I only understood how to write truly immersively fairly recently. I’ll tell you how I did it, which three key insights provided the right framework for me. These form the sandbox, the guidelines, that I use to actually unleash my creative writing.

1. Make use of all the senses

Don’t fall for the beginner’s trap of only using sight in your story. Sight generally works better in visual mediums, like movies, paintings or photos. This is a generalization, of course, but it still illustrates how not all senses are created equal for the craft of writing.

Try to incorporate touch, smell and taste. Can’t do taste very well in a movie, yet we can describe the sensation with as much detail as our hearts desire when writing. The way that sweetness travels across a tongue, perhaps with a sour tang afterwards. Tell the reader how it reminds you of the rhubarb juice your grandmother used to make. Sour with way too many spoons of sugar.

Bring blood alive through its coppery smell and the way it makes your stomach turn involuntarily—even more so because it is your own and it is weirdly intimate to smell yourself like this. Make someone feel the touch of your firstborn, their innocent, soft skin. A little sticky from tears and sweat from a hot night’s sleep. Paper is a perfect medium to tantalize the senses of your reader.

I would argue that sound also needs to be in the mix, obviously, but it’s not my favorite sense to use in an immersive story. Why? I feel like there are plenty of audiovisual mediums that do it better.

2. Start a story in medias res

Less of a general rule, this one. More something that I myself, being a real pantser, have discovered to really match my style of discovering a story. When you begin writing your story in medias res, or within an action, it tends to flow organically from that starting point. This does not have to be a physical action, like an active rescue mission or a fight; it can also be a conversation or a thought, as long as there is forward momentum.

Once you let the action play out, you might find that parts of the world and characters have already taken form. Little to no planning required, so ideal for all of us who want to discover our fictional world as it plays out. For me this is a very fun way to write. It allows me to take a backseat and experience my own story much like a reader does. Fun fact: a story and its characters can even surprise you as a writer this way!

3. Choose your story structure beforehand

I have come to see my creative energy as a flow that needs some gentle direction, before it can transmute into something readable. In practice, this means that, paradoxically, in order to be the most creative, I actually need some boundaries. Like a sandbox that I get to build sandcastles in.

For the very first story I ever finished, kwaad bloed & exotische delicatessen, which actually got published, I used a very rigid structure: the Rashomon narrative structure. To be fair, I had no idea it even had a name back then. Nor did I expect this story to turn out so much better than anything I had written before. I just wanted to tell a story about a single event and repeat it through the eyes of multiple POVs (points of view).

There is ironic tension between the reader knowing everything and each character only seeing part of their world, which infuses the story with some natural energy. As soon as the action that I had started at the very beginning resulted in the event that I had envisioned (a slap), I could simply replay it through different eyes and the story just about wrote itself.

So, what use do these insights have when combined? I’d say that they are a solid basis for the start of your creative tale and for an immersive world to explore; the tools to build your own creative sandbox.

Let’s try for ourselves

For all you creative writers out there, let’s give it a try! Write the beginning of your own story, roughly 250-500 words, and post it in the comments. Let’s apply the following writing theory:

1. Start in medias res. Choose an action, a character, and let it play out on the paper. See how it forms the character and the world itself.

2. Use at least two senses besides sight. Make the world immersive through touch, smell, taste and sound. Be as specific as you can be, nothing too generic.

3. Pick a story structure first. Here are a few that I find really useful: the South Park ABT method, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle and the Kishōtenketsu story structure.

I’ll be doing the same assignment. Note: obviously we won’t necessarily be able to write a complete story with a complete story structure. That’s no problem; it’s more about building a solid foundation. I’ll post my result in the comments. You can all be the judge of whether it’s a good start for a novel or not.

Of course, everyone else is invited to join in the fun as well!

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