Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

The beginner, coming in cold over the transom, had better connect in the first paragraph. Because that is very often all an editor will read. Anyone who's read slush will tell you that it is a fundamentally unpleasant way to spend one's time, and that only a masochist reads unpublishable material through to the end. Editors are a busy lot, and it's essential that they wade through the slush as quickly as possible.

Your story, of course, is not garbage, to be returned unread to whence it came. And, while every sentence you write must be designed to convey this message to the reader, the first sentences have the most work to do.

Such as?

1. GETTING THE STORY MOVING. The worst thing about the openings of most stories by new writers is that they take more time getting started than an old Studebaker on a cold morning. This flaw was very much in evidence among the entries in the Writer's Digest short-story contest; I couldn't tell you how many stories began with the lead character getting out of bed, taking a shower, getting dressed, and going through a quarter or more of the two-thousand-word maximum length before presenting the reader with the story's central problem.

In contrast, here's how Richard Stark opened his novel The Outfit:

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been.

Stark gets things going, doesn't he? He opens with action?right in the middle of action, as a matter of fact?and you're caught up in what's going on before you even have time to wonder who these people are. He'll tell us in due time who Parker is, who the woman is, and why all of this is taking place. And we'll keep reading until then, because he's done a good job of attracting our attention.

This sort of opening doesn't have to consist of action. Here's how Joyce Harrington starts The Old Gray Cat by letting us listen in on a conversation:

I should kill her. I should really kill her.

Yeah, yeah. But how, how?

I could find a way. I bet I could.

Oh, sure.

You don't think I could? I could put poison in her cocoa.

What kind of poison?

Ah, you know, arsenic. Something like that.

This is a teaser?two characters are discussing the murder of a third and we don't know anything more about them than that the prospective victim is female and drinks cocoa. But the situation's compelling and we keep reading.

2. SETTING THE TONE.

The elevator, swift and silent as a garotte, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard's penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster-white. They could have been chosen to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and caliber of which need not concern us.

The paragraph above is the opening of a story of mine, This Crazy Business of Ours, which concerns a meeting of two professional killers. I could as easily have opened it this way:

When the young man stepped off the elevator, Wilson Colliard was pointing a gun at him.

Neither opening is necessarily better than the other. I chose the one I did because I wanted to begin by setting a particular tone for the story. I used the image of the garotte at the start to suggest that the story would be a grim one, then described Colliard at some length to give him a particular presence. I wanted the reader to get a sense of the man before finding out that he had a gun in his hand. The final clause in the paragraph is an arch touch deliberately designed to remind the reader that he's reading a story; I use this kind of distancing device now and then because I think readers have an easier time enjoying a grim story if they know they're not supposed to take it too seriously.

For all of that, this opening does get things going; by the end of the paragraph we've got two men facing each other over a gun.

Sometimes a particular detail, perhaps one which has nothing much to do with the story to follow, can serve to set the tone. Here's how Russell H. Greenan begins The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton:

On Beacon Street near the corner, a mutilated ancient elm tree stands. Having been shorn of all its limbs by the Brookline Forestry Department, it is now only a tall stump. Soon the stump too will be amputated, but meanwhile a twig has started to grow out of the raw chain-sawed surface at the top, and from it a few tender ovate leaves are sprouting.

This visual detail inspires the narrator to meditate on the nature of life and death, and life in the midst of death, and so on. The image of the tree stump, so vividly described for us, prepares us not only for the narrator's rumination but