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Open Strong, Stay Loud: No matter what you are writing, grab your reader's attention early.
The Park Bench Method of Writing Rapid Release Fiction without Burning Out

| The Park Bench Method of Writing Rapid Release Fiction without Burning Out, by Wendy Christine Allen |



By Wendy C Allen

Open Strong, Stay Loud: No matter what you are writing, grab your reader's attention early.

  • Don’t build up.
  • Don’t lay down a foundation.
  • Don’t start with what the character ate for breakfast unless the eggs exploded and the toast screamed.

You get one chance. One sentence. One line that either locks your reader in or loses them forever. They are scrolling. They are swiping. They are distracted. You are not fighting for their respect. You are fighting for their attention. You are a street performer with five seconds to make someone stop and listen.

So you better slap them in the face with the first line.

That’s the power of the Park Bench. You don’t start slow. You don’t start with a map of the world or a long-winded history of the Elven potato trade.

  • You start with a moment.
  • A bang.
  • A question.
  • A scream.
  • A gut punch.
  • A reason to read the second sentence.

Because if the first sentence doesn’t give them a reason to continue, nothing else matters.

The bench is already loaded. It’s charged. It’s the stage. It’s the spark. Sit your character down and give them something worth saying. Worth seeing. Worth reacting to. Maybe there’s a bear in the tree above them. Maybe the bench is on fire. Maybe the bench is in the morgue and the corpse sitting next to them just moved. It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is you do not waste time.

No throat-clearing. No warm-up. No clearing your literary sinuses.

You get in.

You go loud.

You write like someone is about to unplug your keyboard.

Stop asking your story for permission to start. It’s already started. Right now. This sentence. That bench. That moment. Start it like it matters. Because it does.

Do you know what readers hate? Being bored.

Do you know what makes them bored? You trying too hard to be “literary.” You writing about dust motes. You describing the architecture. You stacking adjectives like pancakes and hoping one of them tastes like plot.

Readers don’t want description.

  • They want tension.
  • They want action.
  • They want curiosity.
  • They want to feel something. Anything. Confusion is fine. Horror is fine. Laughter is golden. Boredom is death. Confusion gets them reading to figure it out. Laughter gets them invested. Boredom gets them to close the book and forget your name.

So the opening line isn’t optional.

It’s the entire battlefield.

And don’t be cute. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t write the opening line that you think sounds fancy. Write the line that yanks a reader out of their chair. You are not auditioning for the Pulitzer. You’re trying to grab someone by the throat and scream, “HEY! LOOK AT THIS!”

You are not being subtle. You are not easing in. You are not whispering in the reader’s ear like some Victorian novelist. You are stomping through the door with a chainsaw made of verbs and a fistful of adrenaline. If you start with a whisper, you’ll be forgotten. Start with a scream and they might just stick around to see who got stabbed.

And if you’re thinking, “But I don’t know how to start big,” here’s how:

Put something weird on the bench.

That’s it. That’s the whole method. That’s the shortcut. You put your character on the bench, and then you put something unexpected right in front of them.

The weirder, the better.

“There was a goat eating a newspaper next to him.”
“The bench was nailed to the ceiling.”
“She didn’t notice the gun until she sat on it.”

Boom. You’re in. You’ve got something to work with. Your reader is asking questions. You don’t need to explain it. You just need to keep the story moving.

You don’t need a big plot. You don’t need a twist. You need momentum. Curiosity is momentum. And momentum comes from never letting your foot off the gas. The Park Bench Method is about story as motion. The reader sits on the bench with your character and the world starts spinning.

If your first line is soft, no one sits down. If your first line is boring, the reader walks past your bench.

If your first line is strange, funny, violent, alarming, awkward, unsettling, or confusing?

You’ve got them.

And once you’ve got them?

You do not let go.

This is not the method for slow burns. This is not the method for long exposition. This is the method for writing so fast, so vivid, so immediate that your reader forgets they were supposed to be doing something else and reads the entire story instead.

And that’s the secret.

  • Not editing.
  • Not grammar.
  • Not style guides.

Attention.

If you can get it, you can keep it.

If you can keep it, you’ve won.

So next time you start a story, don’t ease in.

Kick the door down.

Don’t knock. Don’t wait. Don’t write like you’re being polite.

Write like you’ve got five seconds to save your own life.

And whatever you do, do not edit the opening line. Don’t “fix it” later. Don’t water it down. Don’t turn it into oatmeal because some beta reader said it was “a little jarring.”

Jarring is the point.

Be jarring.

Be weird. Be loud.

Loud gets read.

| ©2025 Wendy Christine Allen | All Rights Reserved |

The Park Bench Method To Writing (and the series of articles and rants that go with it)

I've Written An Entire Series on The Park Bench Method of Writing. Here are more of the articles in this set: 

The Park Bench Method To Writing (Just the article - no prompt lists)

The Park Bench Method of Writing (the really old long, rambly post from years ago; the long page with over 10k writing prompts and lots of lists)

Want to see The Park Bench Method of Writing Rapid Release Fiction without Burning Out, in action? Each of the stories linked below, used it:

Looking to read more Quaraun stories?

  • Stuff over 5k and under 20k words I post on GumRoad.

Writing Prompts I Use When Writing this series:






While there are around 20k pages on this website, most of them are blocked from search engines, with only around 800 of them available for appearing in Google/Bing/etc search results. The remainder can only be accessed via the various links found throughout this site. This was done deliberately on my part, and I did it because the bulk of the pages on this website are chapters from 138 novels and 423 novellas, so only the first page of each novel and novella indexed by search engines, and the remainder are linked in order, one page at a time, via clicking "next page" at the end of each. So if you are looking for a specific page from a specific novel, Google can't help you.



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