Let's Get It Started

By Susan

As some of you may know, my husband is a fantastic cook. He plans a meal by spending hours kicked back, scanning Cook's Illustrated, his fingers delicately flipping pages until he smiles, "Ah ha. Yes. This is it." He starts with someone else's recipe, then sets the book aside and makes it his own.

He begins his biggest productions with appetizers: goat cheese and sun dried tomatoes with garlic oil on crustinis paired with the perfect wine. Or maybe an opening course of French onion soup, salty and earthy in a crock full of bread and covered in Gruyere. (To the left is a shot of his sauteed risotto cakes with marinara from scratch.) The beginning, he tells me, prepares the guest for the food to come. It sets the palate. It gives you a taste for the flavor of the meal. It takes research, attention to detail, and flavor.

In my quest for the best possible beginning for my manuscript, I held a mini-workshop for myself last night, and I thought I would share it with you. In many ways, your opening scene is your appetizer to your meal. As I set the tone for my story, I can't help but think about the way my husband plans a meal. If this is helpful, let me know!

Here were my self-imposed assignments:
Read The First Ten Pages of My Favorite Novels (Read the recipes)Here are some opening lines: (Can you match them with the author and title? See the end of the post for answers)

“My wound is geography. It is my anchorage, my port of call.”
“You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.”
“When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
“At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high—pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.”
“Alice Della Rocca hated ski school.”

What can I learn from these writers and their opening scenes? What is the pace? What tone do these opening pages set for the entire work?

Decide What I Want to Say (What are my ingredients?)
1) Who do I want to introduce?
2) What theme do I want to share?
3) Is my goal to paint a picture of setting, character, plot or all three?

Determine My Audience (Prepare the Palate)
Am I writing to impress someone or writing to tell a story? (To tell a story). What is the story I am attempting to tell? Is that story succinct or fractured? What is the strongest possible scene that can create interest and get that message across? Is it a scene I’ve already written or do I need to start again?

Clean It Up (Attention to detail)Is my formatting correct? Do I have consistent errors, typos, and mistakes that I can’t see?

There's more to an opening scene than just clean grammar and the introduction of characters. I want to make sure I am true to the work, true to the tone, and true to the theme from the first page forward. Just like a fine dinner, I want my novel to be an experience. And I want to prepare the reader, just as my husband prepares dinner guests, for a fantastic meal.

In your own work, revisit your beginning. Does it showcase your story and make the reader want more? The answer is one you may never know. Just don't allow self-doubt to cripple your voice. Write what you love, and write it because you love it. Hopefully, others will love it too.

Answers to opening lines:

Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

On the Art of First Impressions

by Karen Harrington

First Impression: noun - a lasting effect, opinion, or mental image of somebody or something.

I've been thinking about the first impression writers make with page one of their works. I don't know about you, but the first few sentences I write for any work-in-progress are written and re-written and re-written. This is all for good reason. Imagine the casual bookstore customer picking up a book at the store, reading the jacket flap, then the first page, only to put it back on the shelf because the style or immediacy of conflict or setting didn't pull them in. I confess - I am one of those casual readers. It may not be a fair assessment, but with so many books on my ever-expanding wish list, it's the one I use.

Now, I don't have any special advice to offer on the subject of first impressions other than this: you have to make a compelling one. One of my writing professors advised his students to do this by ensuring "your first sentence puts your own soul in jeopardy." I think what he meant by this was that the opening had to suggest something that touched a lightning rod within the writer; something that might even skate close to an idea or theme that troubles your sleep. When I was working on my novel JANEOLOGY, the questions that kept me up at night were: Aren't there signs when someone is about to have a mental break-down? And if so, wouldn't a person's spouse see the approaching storm? So for this work, my opening was: "I stared at my attorney as he began his defense that I did not share the blame in the murder of my son."

I think there's no better way to learn the art of the literary first impression than to read as many opening lines as possible and see how they hit you.

So, I'd like to invite everyone to contribute the first line of his/her work-in-progress in the comments section of this post. Don't be shy! Several of us at What Women Write will get the party started. Here are the first lines of our works-in-progress.

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Martha Niles glanced at the stack of afternoon mail, still untouched on the table. The top envelope, identical to several others she had received over the past few months, bore the signature orb and cross logo of the Roycroft Shops in East Aurora. This one was addressed to Sarah Wainwright, her mother. – from THE OAK LOVERS by Kim Bullock

My mother once told me: Never date a man you wouldn’t marry. This followed on the heels of: You’re never fully dressed until you smile. Like most of her pearls of wisdom, I pretended to pay attention and then did whatever I pleased. - from WAITING TO KNOCK by Pamela Hammonds

Here is something you have to learn on your own: Not every person responds to words the same way. For example, my father shouted, got red in the face and told me not to call my mother crazy even though she tried to kill me. But I looked up crazy in the dictionary so I know I’m right.. - from TELL ME IN YOUR OWN WORDS by Karen Harrington

When we first met, a decade and a handful of change ago, I was hateful to Dorrie. She thought it was because of the color of her skin, but she was wrong. Up around eighty or so – maybe even seventy – a person forgets to use her filters. Or she’s beyond caring. - from ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE by Julie Kibler

I actually met Mac at the supermarket, so there goes any justification for disdain at my mother picking up men there. Still. This is hardly the same thing. For one, we weren’t lingering over a dish of chana masala, but in the regular, non-fragrant American supermarket, skimming blueberry muffin mixes, which are about as un-Indian as you can get if you think about it. - from KICK PUNCH BREATHE by Elizabeth Lynd

Gabriel Tucci felt the walls constrict, remembered each stroke of graphite on parchment, each thwack of setting maul to stone above the nave. No fat lemons, no olive trees, no grappa; when you seek a city of buildings and straight lines, do not be surprised when you are stabbed in the heart. - from THE ARCHITECT AT HIGHGATE by Joan Mora

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Okay, now it's YOUR turn. Share YOUR first lines and/or tell me if there's a book with an opening that left a lasting first impression.

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Three Writing Resources to Help Craft Your First Impressions

1. The 100 Best First Lines of Novels according to the American Book Review.

2. A cool selection and analysis of opening lines from famous novels featured on storyispromise.com

3. Susan Ishmael-Poulos' must-read piece on great beginnings.