The author should begin every story by caring for her reader. You are asking your reader to hold your hand and take a long walk with you. Your opening, and your very first sentence should evoke in your reader the desire to keep going.
The worst way to open any story is to take your reader’s hand and say, “Come with me, I’m going to make you confused for a while, but it will all make sense soon, trust me.”
Why this is wrong:
a. nobody trusts writers, you must earn your reader’s trust slowly.
b. nobody likes to be confused, especially when they do not have to be.
c. readers know that things that start confusing usually do not sort themselves out, so it is a bad investment of time.
d. no reader cares about you, your confusion, or your sorting-out of confusion, at the beginning of a book, you have to make them care.
Usually what a confusing beginning indicates is a writer who is not thinking of her reader as the most important person. Your job as a storyteller is to get your reader to stay home from work to know what the story does next. That requires love for your reader. That love is the unifying force behind all great literature.
To me, the first sentence of Huckleberry Finn shows the full force of Twain’s genius:
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
I love it because you have the fictional protagonist introducing the prior fictional protagonist by name, and indirectly bringing the author into the room. And who is Huck talking to? He is talking directly to you, the reader. So here Twain puts us all in the room together. You, him, and this crazy kid named Huck who has no problem acknowledging his author and talking to the reader directly. All barriers are dissolved.
Next, Gabe Marquez plays tricks with time in his opening sentence, and you know all bets are off somehow when you get to the end. The birth of magical realism. Also, just to make it fun, you are frozen in front of a firing squad.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
Next, Kafka gives you the whole book in one sentence. The word “truly” does a lot of work here.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
Even if I did not know that book, if someone showed that sentence to me I would know immediately it was Kafka. I’m not sure I would recognize any other author as easily.
Finally, this sentence, from a person many consider the master, sums up all of Anna Karenina in one swoop, and also says something perfectly true while in the omniscient-third voice, which, like so much of Tolstoy, is something that only he seems to get away with.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
What is important about the above sentences to us mortals, is that they show how even the geniuses spend a lot of time with that first sentence. Even geniuses demonstrate their love for the reader. That is the difference sometimes between a clever writer, and a genius.
In summary, the first sentence must do something other than to cause the reader to say, “Wha the hell?” It can, as Gabe Marquez shows, say something confounding, like, “his father took him to discover ice,” but notice that that is the last thing in the sentence, and he already has you hooked-in by having his protagonist standing in front of the firing line. That is where the genius of that sentence is, in that he holds you in front of the firing line before boggling your mind. He does it throughout the book.
Of course there are exceptions to all rules, see, for example, any novel by James Joyce.
But for the rest of us, we want our reader to keep reading right? If we want them to keep reading, we have to love them at the beginning and get them to willingly walk along with us. Once they get walking, there is a lot more freedom, but at first, we have to hook them, ground them into our story, give them a stake, give them something to care about.
Will the firing line shoot Buendia?
What will happen to Josef K.?
If you can hook them in and tell your whole story in a single sentence, then you may someday be added to the list of great openings.
Thursday, April 28, 2016