I don't normally enter writing contests (not that I'm
opposed to them), but three years ago, I submitted the first three pages of
what was then my WIP (work in progress) to the Guide to Literary Agents
literary fiction contest. To my surprise, I won - or rather, my beginning did.
Even so,
I ended up revising the beginning of what is now my latest novel, and I'm glad
I did. Here’s what Publishers Weekly says
about how the novel begins now:
This
lyrically written coming-of-age story from Vanasse grabs you from the opening
line and never lets go: “I am a poem, Sylvie once thought, swollen like a
springtime river, light swirled in dark, music and memory.”
Author Sinclair Lewis learned
the hard way about the importance of beginnings. Cruising the Atlantic aboard
the Queen Elizabeth, he was pleased to see a fellow passenger settle into a
deck chair and open his latest novel. She read the first page, got up, and
dropped the book over the railing, into the ocean. “If I didn’t know it
already,” Lewis told his assistant Barnaby Conrad, “I learned then that the
first page – even the first sentence – of one’s article, short story, novel, or
nonfiction book is of paramount importance.”
Don’t Try This at Home
Suppose
you hand the first 250 words of your manuscript to an actress, who then reads
it before a panel of four agents and editors. Each agent raises a hand at the
point where his or her interest fades. When two hands are raised, the actress
quits reading. Yours doesn’t get read to the end? Don’t feel bad: only 25
percent do.
This was
the scenario that played out at a “Writer Idol” event. As reported by Livia
Blackburne on the Guide to Literary Agents, there were many reasons the
panelists rejected the beginnings. They were generic, or slow. There was too
much unrealistic internal narration, or too much information. There were too
many clichés, or the writing was unfocused, or the writer seemed to be trying
too hard. In
her PubRants blog, agent Kristen Nelson elaborates on this latter problem,
pointing out that too often authors trying for active beginnings overload them
with action.
Ways to Begin
The
fundamental purpose of a beginning is simple: it must entice the reader to want
more. In Learning
to Write Fiction from the Masters, Conrad suggests several types of
beginnings that, skillfully rendered, will lure readers into the prose.
Conventions of the nineteenth century allowed the luxury of beginning with
setting, or a combination of setting and character, strategies that are
tougher, though not impossible, to pull off with today’s attention-challenged
readers. If you begin with setting, Conrad warns, you need to be masterful with
it, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald in launching Tender
is the Night, using specific details, imagery, dynamic verbs,
foreshadowing, and a hint of conflict.
You can
also begin with a provocative thought, though you’ll want to follow it directly
with specifics of the story. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” says
Jane Austen in the opening of Pride
and Prejudice. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way,” opens Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina.
By no
means do beginnings need to be elaborate. The
Old Man and the Sea opens like a news story, with the straight
facts: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf
Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a
fish.” The appeal can be more emotional, as in the opening sentence of Mary
McCarthy’s The
Company She Keeps: “She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the
petunias bloomed.” Or the novel can open with action: “They threw me off the
hay truck about noon ,”
begins James Cain in The Postman Always Rings Twice. In each of
these examples, there’s enough said to engage the reader, and there’s enough
left out for the reader to want to know more.
With some
beginnings, the reader dives with grace into the story. With others, it’s more
of a cannonball splash. In media res takes the reader directly
into the middle of a scene. Opening with dialogue has the same effect. When
you’re suddenly immersed in a scene, you grab for bits to hang onto. You want
to puzzle your way to some clarity. In short, you’re hooked.
Character
beginnings prove equally enticing. Look no farther than Conrad’s Lord Jim or
Nabokov’s Lolita for
proof that a book can open successfully with character. Also endearing is the
author’s appeal to the reader, as in Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” or Twain’s
“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that don’t matter.” Conrad calls this
author-to-reader appeal “disarming, confidential, effective, and somewhat
old-fashioned,” but given today’s emphasis on voice, it seems more than modern.
Ending Thoughts on Beginnings
It’s all
too easy to get attached to our beginnings. Because they come to us first, they
soon feel indelible. Remember - they’re not.
To weigh in on what makes a good beginning, check out the “Flog
a Pro” feature at Writer Unboxed.
