The first sentence of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is “Those who know me now will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child.”
If you’ve been reading my posts, you expect me to argue that there is an implied question in the sentence and that readers read beyond it hoping for an answer. You’re right. What’s changed for this character so that they no longer speak as much as they used to? Is this a good thing (“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt” –Abraham Lincoln) or bad (Silence = Death)?
The sentence also explicitly suggests a change in a character, and it characterizes because this is a character who thinks about their life, time, and others, or their audience. This first sentence, in some ways, begins to address the themes of the novel, which can be read as asking about sentience and what sentience in others (especially animals) ethically requires of humanity.
Finally, all of this reminds me of one of Donald Barthelme’s expectations of sentences, that they have a “metaphysical dimension.” Barthelme offers this definition: “By ‘metaphysical dimension’ I mean a quality that turns the mind toward original questions, first principles, the deepest sort of search for meaning.” Ethical questions, especially when they involve how we treat our neighbors, evoke first principles.
Writing Fiction 