Looking for a good opener? Try one of these suggestions from Gennifer Choldenko.

Gennifer Choldenko was born in Santa Monica, California in 1957. She was the youngest child in a large loud family. Her nickname as a kid was “Snot-Nose”. Gennifer spent most of her time on the back of a horse, exploring the craggy hills of Southern California. After college, Gennifer got a job as a copywriter in a small ad agency. In the evenings, she took classes at Art Center Art College of Design in illustration. This eventually led to a full-time study of illustration at Art Center and Rhode Island School of Design. After RISD, she began to pursue children’s books with a vengeance. It has taken her a long time to learn her craft and find her way in the field of children’s books. After having a lot of success in advertising, it was very clear to Gennifer that she’d rather be a failure in a field she loved than a success in a field she hated. Her first book, a picture book called Moonstruck: The True Story of the Cow Who Jumped Over the Moon received various awards in the United States, including being picked as one of the top 100 books of 1997 by the NY Library. If A Tree Falls At Lunch Break, published in January 2008 is her third novel for Bloomsbury.

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 Gennifer says:

Each of my books has begun in a different manner. Notes from a Liar and Her Dog came to me in the middle of the night. I literally woke up at two in the morning and began to write in the voice of the main character: Ant, who I might add, is nothing like me. Al Capone Does my Shirts began when I read a newspaper article on kids who lived on Alcatraz when there was a working penitentiary on the island. If a Tree Falls at Lunch Break began with the character Kirsten, but the novel went nowhere until a traffic accident at a local private school set the book on its course. Strangely enough, there is no traffic accident in this novel, and yet there is a collision of two lives which came oddly enough out of the traffic accident idea.

A new novel I’ve just started began with a suggestion from my publisher about basing a novel on a character like Kippy, the little sister in If a Tree Falls at Lunch Break. Another novel I’m working on began with a small snippet of a very strange dream I had one night.

 For me, I think it’s important to be open to lots of different ways of beginning a novel, so that I don’t fall in the trap of writing each book in the same way. I don’t want to write the same kind of novel over and over again – and I think being open to different beginnings is one of the ways I avoid that.

 I also write picture books, but I have found that I get many more novel ideas than picture book ideas. That is because I believe I’m by nature a novelist – I prefer the novel writing experience which I liken to living deep under water and building a whole world down there to the (for me anyway) less intense practice of picture book writing. But I have noticed that the more I read and write in any one genre, the more ideas I get for that genre. So I think there is something to letting your subconscious know you are looking for certain kinds of ideas.

Often a novel idea begins in a very vague way. I will, for example, become enamored of a certain narrative technique. I am quite fond of unreliable narrators for example and I know one day I will play with this concept. From here I might imagine all kinds of different unreliable narrator characters. I like to make lists to make certain I come up with lots of different ideas, rather than go with the first idea that occurs to me. And from my list of unreliable narrators maybe one or two characters might really capture my imagination. From here, then I will try to figure out a situation that will push every button the character has. A situation that will paint that character into a corner so that we will see on the deepest level who he or she really is.

 With If a Tree Falls at Lunch Break I played with the idea of two narrators -- two very different perspectives on the same situation. I’ve always been interested in how two people can experience the same situation in such a dramatically different manner and so I found this novel quite stimulating to write. In fact, it felt more like I was reading a page turner than writing one; the difference being I had to write really quickly so I could find out what happened next.

 Suggestions for starting stories.

 I recently taught a workshop in writing for kids and I used the following story starters. Though I haven’t yet started a story in exactly this way, I find these kinds of exercises intriguing. And I think one day I will begin a novel from an exercise such as this:

#1. A gigantic box – the size of a small bus – is sitting on your front lawn squishing your dad’s heirloom tomato plants. It’s addressed to you in handwriting you don’t recognize. The box is moving slightly as if its contents are alive. From inside the box you hear . . .

 #2. You know you’re dead. You’re absolutely sure of it. You remember so clearly the accident, the emergency room, the doctor pronouncing the time of your death. And yet here you are in Mrs. Diderian’s Geometry class just like always . . .

#3. He was the spitting image of my Uncle Irving, except his skin was bright green – the color of unripe bananas. And the pads of his fingers were flat like the tail of a platypus. And yet here he sat at our Thanksgiving table in the seat Uncle Irving always occupied . . . .

 #4. She’s been your best friend your whole life. She’s the only person you completely trust, but when you see her newest MY SPACE page, you suddenly begin to wonder . . .

#5. No one ever suspected him. He had the kind of face everyone trusted. You were the only one who saw. And when you told, it was clear no one believed you . . .

#6. You’ve been taken to headquarters on Planet Pimpernel. You know why, of course. What you don’t know is . . .

#7. Late last night you receive a text message from an unknown sender. It said you are being watched. We know where you live, where you go to school, what kind of car your mom drives. We know everything . . .

#8. You didn’t mean to read his journal. Really you didn’t. But there it was open on the table . ..

 #9. It was an ordinary pen – the kind you buy from Staples 100 for 7.99. It was a murky turquoise color with a leaky head. But the second you picked it up . . .