Spanish poet Antonio Machado was born in Seville in 1875 and died in February 1939. His health failed while he was escaping Spain as its government fell to the Fascists at the end of its Civil War.

Spain had long been divided. Although its Civil War began in 1936, Machado named this split “the two Spains” in his book Proverbios y cantares (Proverbs and Songs), Poem LIII, in 1917, and the name stuck.

Roughly speaking, one side of the two Spains was conservative, religious, rural, and traditional; the other progressive, secular, urban, and modernist. There were also differences between regions and between people with privilege and people condemned to poverty. The split ran deep and complex.

As Machado wrote in this poem, twenty years before the brutal war began, one Spain had a death grip on its position, the other was just waking up, and the future did not look good:

Ya hay un español que quiere
vivir y a vivir empieza,
entre una España que muere
y otra España que bosteza.

Españolito que vienes
al mundo te guarde Dios.
Una de las dos Españas
ha de helarte el corazón.

My translation:

There now is a Spaniard who wishes
to live and begins to live,
amid one Spain that is dying
and another Spain that yawns.

Child of Spain, as you come
into the world, may God help you.
One of the two Spains
is going to freeze your heart.

At the Capricon science fiction convention earlier this month, I led a writing workshop.

“It’s A Start: A Workshop On Your First Paragraph — A good opening paragraph for a story or novel will carry the work to success. In this workshop, we will consider seventeen different ways to start a work of fiction, explore how each one will affect the reader, and evaluate the promise it sets for the story.”

Opening paragraphs are hard to write because so much rides on them. They should evoke the tone, voice, setting, genre, characters, stakes, conflict, trajectory, intrigue, point of view, grab attention, make readers feel they’re in skillful hands, and be interesting for the reader — or some of this, at least. Different kinds of opening paragraphs let you focus on the elements that matter to the story you want to tell.

Seventeen is a somewhat arbitrary number, but these openings offer a clue to the breadth of possibilities available. You could start with something unexpected, an image, action, simplicity, questions, curiosity, quotes, a frame, dialogue, emotion, captivation, philosophy, change, the protagonist, setting, a prologue, or flash-forward.

You can download a PDF here that explains each one and offers a couple of examples. Happy writing!

Once again, you curse the gods of literature: Your “short story” turned out to be the first chapter of a novel, and you really wanted a short story. How do you keep things short? Try to limit the number of important characters to two or three. Use one point of view. Keep the conflict simple, the way that postage stamp artwork is memorable but simple. Compress the time frame. Aim for a single effect. Include only the most essential information. If you need a short story idea, here are a few.

• This is a fantasy story in which a gem broker becomes obsessed over a new kind of stone that appears at a roadside market.

• This is young adult story in which a panic-stricken alien learns self-defense from a dog.

• This is a competence p0rn story about an incorrigible lunar pioneer who endangers the settlement by sloppy habits that introduce lunar dust, which has damaging and dangerous sharp edges, into living and working quarters.