I've started writing a lot of novels (and I've even finished
three of them), and as editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books I read the starts of a lot of submitted novels (many more than I read
the endings of), and spend a lot of time thinking about beginnings.
Editors are famously supposed to read the first paragraph or first page
of a manuscript and decide whether or not to keep reading; many
editors I know tell me they routinely reject novels on the basis of
the first sentence.
The received wisdom, if you read a lot of writing advice
(and, alas, I do), is that you need to have a killer first sentence,
something that will grab the fickle reader, something that raises a
life-or-death
question or creates tension right away, like-
"Elspeth
died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching
tea shoot into a small plastic cup." ~Her
Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
Or,
"Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich." ~Accelerando by Charles Stross
Or even, "We went to the moon to have
fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck." ~ Feed by MT Anderson
(When we say "reader" above, what we really mean
is "editor." Something that will grab the editor. The distracted,
overworked, insomniac editor.)
Now, I love those first lines. I laughed out loud in delight
and envy at Feed's first sentence. But I don't
want every book to start with a bang like that. Sometimes I want a little foreplay.
One of the most celebrated books of the year, which was just rightfully shortlisted for the Booker, has this first
sentence: "Futh stands on the ferry deck, holding on to the cold railings
with his soft hands." ~The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
It's not a terrible beginning: it sets the scene and gives
us some expectations for the style of the rest of the book; but it's
not exactly gripping, is it? You didn't read it and say to
yourself, "but what could possibly happen next?!" You might have some
questions (where is he going? why doesn't he put on some gloves?) but
they don't have any particular urgency. The
Lighthouse takes a good couple of paragraphs to get into the swing of things (it's the third paragraph that pulled me into the story: "She had been
gone for almost a year by then, by the time Futh and his father took this
holiday together. Mostly, she was not mentioned, and Futh longed for
his father or anybody to say, 'Your mother...' so that his heart
would life. But then, when she was spoken about, she would
invariably be spoiled in some way and he would wish that nothing had been
said after all.") I didn't need a killer sentence to draw me in to
this book, or to books like that take their time to establish an
understanding with me.
The first page does need to shine in some way, either with
the bright light of a killer line, or with the soft early-morning
sunshine of a book like The Lighthouse. I'm probably
not going to continue reading a book that begins with a long preface explaining
the history of the world the main story is set in, or with the main
character waking up (especially if the first thing they do is admire
themselves
in the mirror), or with a description of the weather,
because I've already read loads of other books that start like that which
were limp and ham-handed and I don't want to read more, unless
(there's always an exception) it's done in really a perfect way. Jane Eyre,
for example, starts with the weather:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.I was glad of it; I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
But really there's very little about the weather there; it's
all about the family's reaction to the weather, and to inaction, and
to each other.
A really great beginning doesn't have to shout or shock.
Beginnings should have a distinctive voice, and some
hints at characterization and conflict and setting, unless there's a
compelling reason to postpone those things.
Probably the best book I've read this year, China Mieville's The City & The City, starts, "I
could not see the street or much of the estate." This is a science fiction murder
mystery, a combination of genres which both tend toward the killer
first sentence paradigm of writing, but it isn't until the fourth paragraph
that we get a truly killer sentence, no pun intended: "Nothing
is still like the dead are still." Strictly speaking, we didn't need
the rambling paragraphs about the people watching out their windows or
the weedy grass and wheel tracks and gulls, before we got to the dead
body, but they gave us a sense of the setting and the sort of person
the point of view character is before we started thinking about where
that corpse could have come from.
Strictly speaking, of course, we don't need fiction at all.
The essence of the story of The City & The
City could be told in a few paragraphs; The Lighthouse could be
told in a few sentences. There's no prize for efficiency, and we don't
have to kill with the first sentence. We can ease in, poke around the world we're establishing, and if we're artful about it the reader will
come along for the stroll.
Photo by Peter Merriam |
Joanne Merriam is a Nova Scotian living in Nashville. She is
the author of the poetry collection The Glaze from Breaking, several short stories, and several unpublished novels, and
is the editor Upper Rubber Boot Books.
I've been a sucker for first lines, "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." ~The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.
ReplyDeleteAnd I do mean sucker in some cases, drawn in by excellent portent a first line, paragraph, page, and then sometimes after the first couple three chapters I find out the novel's a big tease. The author doesn't maintain it. Not that the whole novel has to be written that way, but sometimes it feels as though a different writer writes the beginning and someone else does the rest...
Was wondering if you've read Katherine Mansfield "At the Bay." It takes so long to get to any real point, and the POV is constantly changing (or simply doesn't exist) but I love that story, and worry that stories like this will never be published again. Think Margaret Wise Brown's "The Little Island" but much longer and for adults.
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