Stephen D. Gibson
In other words, people naturally create stories, breaking up those clock-ticking seconds and replacing them with dramatic rising action, heart-stopping climaxes, and resolutions. Storytellers “lengthen time” with focus and careful description and contract time with descriptive brevity, summary, or even absence. The simple choice of when to start and when to stop the story imposes significance and value on certain events and diminishes others.
Kylie Nielson Turley
“Equally important, the scene is required for what it does to the reader’s emotional involvement with these two people. As they become friends, they win our friendship. As they impress each other with their warmth and generosity, they impress us as well” (107).
–Wayne Booth on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
Notice this strategy for beginning from “Ghosts and Empties” in Lauren Groff’s collection Florida: “I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.” Good first sentences, like this one, contain tension (both within and external to the character here) and something at risk (the narrator’s relationships, maybe, and sense of self almost certainly).
Notice this first sentence from later in the same collection: “The storm came and erased the quiet. Well, the older sister thought, an island is never really quiet.” The sense of tension, as in the world being more complicated than the first sentence might suggest, at least to these characters, is something these two sentences from Florida have in common. It’s a good strategy, one Groff uses often.
Finally, characterization also begins immediately, along with plot. Because the tension (sense of self in one sentence and a storm in another) is important to the characters and their actions or situation, the beginnings also provide an implied question and so the impulse to move forward into the story: how will the tension be resolved?
He said: the sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorist used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it.
Democracy by Joan Didion
Democracy is about many things, but one of them is the testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. I recommend the novel. Here are some quick thoughts about this sentence from Didion’s book.
“She stayed and read. Nicholas Nickleby had seemed as endless to her as time must seem to him, and it had now been arranged between them, without words, that she was to sit there beside him and read – but silently, to herself. He too was completely silent while she read.”
from The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
I think these sentences provide enough context, but my memory suggests (though I’m not perfectly sure) that they describe a daughter reading to an aged father.
Here are some quick thoughts.
Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshal your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.
Hilary Mantel
It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.… The not knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.
~Donald Barthelme, “Not-knowing”
The scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s visual, it’s Technicolor—something I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into the breach.
Elisa Gabber quoting Don DeLillo
It is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once.
from Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
This is the first sentence of a novel written in 1952. The novel is good and this sentence is excellent.
First sentences should include at least one implied question, a compelling question that leads readers into the text in search of an answer. The sentence quoted above includes an implied question about at least the life of the old queen’s baby daughter. It is easily read as including questions about the relationships between the queens and the king. Most compelling is the question of what the king does next. What happens to the baby? The rest of the novel answers that question.
The strategy of implied questions can and should be used at the beginning of chapters as well. Before answering any one implied question, be sure at least one other has been asked. A story or novel might be organized or outlined as a long series of related implied questions and answers.
Perhaps I should start an “Exercises” category for posts? I’ll think about it. While this post is much closer to an exercise than the sort of thing usually found in “Reading Like a Writer,” I hope it is useful in the same way.
The questions below are a revision of Arthur Aron’s research into creating emotional intimacy between individuals. His work suggests 36 questions. They are best asked and answered in the order below. After you have answered them, consider which answers might be expanded into engaging scenes for readers.
Answer these questions to help create a character or characters.
SET I
SET II
SET III
Writing Fiction 