I like this quotation from Tana French’s In the Woods: “What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this–two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

This is an interesting character because, in part, he knows himself well enough to just state an internal tension. Other internal tensions that he might not be as aware of are certainly possible as are external tensions (he’s a police officer). I have not read the whole book yet, but it already suggests a way to complicate characters. The explicit can be as fascinating as the hidden.

I’m enjoying Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels. Herron carefully controls the information given to readers. He misleads them in interesting ways. Characters die. He’s doing fascinating stuff with spy fiction as a genre. The main character Jackson Lamb is so not James Bond, and he leads a team of spies who have failed and been relegated to “Slough House,” as the rest of the agency calls it. The team has been nicknamed “Slow Horses” by others in the agency.

One technique Herron uses in Dead Lions, the second book of the series, is bookends or “a return with a difference.” The are lots of examples of this technique, from The Hero’s Journey generally to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings specifically. (The hobbits return to The Shire changed and are able to make necessary changes there, for example.)

I think as a way to introduce new readers to the Slow Horses team in Dead Lions, Herron begins with a hypothetical cat sneaking into their base of operations. This hypothetical cat moves from room to room in the shabby building where the Slow Horses work. As readers follow the cat, they learn about different characters as they see how the characters inhabit their offices. Setting characterizes. Also, readers learn about the characters as they see their reactions to a hypothetical cat. I think at least one character feeds the cat. Most ignore it. Jackson Lamb drops it out the widow of his third-story office.

The return with a difference occurs as the novel ends. There is a general summary, but also a mouse that makes its way around Slough House. Like the cat, the mouse observes the characters. Those observations provide closure for character arcs and the closing of those character arcs helps close the narrative generally. In some cases, the presence of the mouse allows for characterization. Jackson Lamb, for example, upon seeing the mouse, says “What Slough House needs is a cat.”

I’ll continue reading this series because it’s compelling, and I find myself learning about writing from it.

“Does the Egg Man bring the Son of Man his eggs?”

“He yet brings him his eggs.”

“How does he like his eggs?”

“Who?”

“Son of Man. How do he like his eggs?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

“I don’t know him,” Nate said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Miggy said. “He knows you.”

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

I checked this book out from the library, but I want to have my own copy. I’ll be buying one soon.

This tiny quotation ends a chapter. It ends that chapter with a mystery as one character knows something that neither readers nor another character knows. Not reading on, especially given the context the rest of the chapter provides, feels impossible to me.

The context consists of Miggy sharing information about her job and eating a slice of pie, which could be catastrophically boring but in McBride’s narrative isn’t. Part of the reason it isn’t boring is because of earlier characterization and who is at stake. But even if the chapter stood alone it would include characters’ reactions to each other. Those reactions provide tension. The dialogue also characterizes, and it reflects tensions between characters, but much of it is long paragraphs of Miggy describing her workplace. Those descriptions matter to readers because of earlier work McBride has done, but also because of the setting as she shares those descriptions and how Miggy uses an element of it: the pie. Finally, the description is interesting because she has reasons to not give it. She’s in favor of how the information she’s presenting might be used, but wary of being the source of it and explicitly presents it in a way she feels will give her deniability. This also adds to the tension. She’s presenting a plan for a rescue. (I’ll avoid spoilers by saying no more.)

There is much more to say about this chapter and this book: the way dialogue characterizes, the implications of names characters give themselves and that characters give each other, how backstories can contain mysteries and move the plot, and how chapters can be structured to hook reads as much as first lines. I highly recommend The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store as a novel but also as a textbook on fiction writing.

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

This is an appealing first sentence in part because it hints at so many possibilities. Short stories often begin with first sentences that suggest something at risk for a character, or that’s certainly one of my favorite approaches. Some novels start the same way, but here is another technique. Options, enough that a reader literally wonders what will happen next, are another great way to begin and might be an especially good way to start a novel.

Among the options and directions the next sentence could take readers, among the questions the next sentences, paragraphs, and chapters can answer are why is Manderley important enough to dream of, what is Manderley, what is the character’s life like during the day (is it better or worse than their dream), and even what have other dreams (nightmares?) of this person or place been like.

Sharing dreams is also an intimate thing. Readers are immediately invited inside the character’s inner life and into a version of that inner life the character does not control perfectly but that probably has some relationship to their daily life. Dreams characterize. Readers know they are getting something they’ll need to interpret. Characters might offer interpretations of their own dreams (or refuse to interpret them) in ways that reveal who they are to readers. Readers will get to know who this “I” is by reading on.

Journal entries might provide similar invitations into inner lives. Epislatory fiction adds the possibility of an audience and complicates the degree of invitation as a result. A similar first sentence might begin with a dilemma: “My new boyfriend left his journal/laptop/browser open on his desk.” A dilemma like this is an opportunity for intimacy but doesn’t seem an invitation to the same degree of closeness as a dream, at least not to me this morning.

“One of them moved forward with a courteous smile, his hands crossed over his chest like a bishop. He must have been in his early fifties, and his build and spare hair lent him the air of a bird of prey. He had a penetrating gaze and gave off an aroma of fresh eau de cologne and mothballs.”

–Father Fernando Ramos in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This is a brief three sentence description of a minor character (I think; I haven’t finished the book yet). Ruiz Zafon descriptions are a strength. In the first sentence, Father Fernando Ramos sets himself apart from a group of priests by moving toward the characters; he also gestures in a way that invites comparison to others higher in the hierarchy. (Does this suggest he is ambitious?) The physical description continues in the second sentence and ends with another comparison, this one more dangerous. It also includes a rhyme and a pun. The third sentence includes another direct description and contrasting (perhaps funny?) sensory details.

In other words, Ramon is created in three sentences with a movement, context (the hierarchy and an attitude toward it), two sets of physical descriptions and comparisons, and a (non-visual) bit of sensory information.

Here is an attempt at something similar: The old man drew his bow slowly over the strings, letting the sound quiet the tavern like the gongs that called the town to prayer. He was at least seventy, spotty in his baldness, his face as blank and his fiddle as steady as stone. He exhaled loudly but slowly and sounded both tired and excited.

(“Tired” and “excited” are both too abstract, but it’s a start.)

First sentences receive lots of attention when reading like a writer. They should.

Endings are harder to study because they are more dependent on the rest of the story. (One way to address this is to read much shorter stories and while that can have its own complications, I like it.)

Consider the ending of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” (Spoilers ahead.)

The children had stones already, and someone gave Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed and they they were upon her.

The first two paragraphs of the story give this ending its power because they present an mundane town gathering with two slightly odd, but not too troubling exceptions: a lottery is being held and stones are being gathered. Readers discover the connection between the stones and the lottery as the story ends. So, one strategy for an effective ending is a return to earlier elements that shows a connection readers might not expect.

Ray Bradbury’s “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” does something similar. It starts with a house making an announcement to occupants who are no longer there. The story follows the house through the process of its day and through a fire that destroys it. Here is the ending:

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is . . .”

This last sentence also returns to earlier story elements. It shows that a process begun in the first paragraph continues but under changed/broken conditions, rather than showing a connection as Jackson’s ending did.

If you are worried about writing an ending, consider drafting a return to something earlier, but with a difference. The difference might show a change like Bradbury’s or a connection like Jackson’s.

And then they were eighteen, and not just leaving home but desperate to begin three permanently separate adult lives, which is exactly what would’ve happened if the Oppenheimer family hadn’t taken a turn for the strange and quite possibly unprecedented. But it did – we did – and that has made all the difference.

The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz

These sentences end a prologue about triplets that seem to dislike each other, or are at least indifferent toward each other, notwithstanding one parent’s efforts. The prologue hooked me, and I’m enjoying continuing to read the book.

What do these sentences teach about writing?

• The longer sentence clearly announces a desire and immediately complicates it in a way that implies questions: Strange how? Unprecedented? Really? Readers are likely to read on with an interest in the answers to those questions.
• A process–leaving home and establishing independent identities–is interrupted. How that process might continue or how it might become something new or what happens if the process is stopped . . . these are all potential sources of tension. The sentences have implications the rest of the book can explore.
• The second sentence is much shorter, which provides a nice contrast. It also narrates from a self-effacing “we” which appears for the first time in what had seemed a third-person text. The “we” is also in tension with the dislike the triplets have stated for each other. In some sense, they, it seems, speak together. It’s also possible that one of them is comfortable claiming to speak for the others. Which of these two possibilities is the case? Readers read on to find out.
• Finally, the last phrase is an allusion to Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” which emphasizes the theme of “a turn for the strange” verses remaining typical that seems to be developing.

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.

• The comma splices rush readers to the phrase “he never got it.” Why? Where in your writing might you use this technique of moving readers toward a phrase quickly? Which phrase?
• This sentence characterizes the “he” who said it. One of the things he remembers from the nuclear testing is this painter’s efforts. It is an interesting enough memory for this character that he brings it back up, and that tells readers about him. But this sentence also characterizes the detonation theorist who paints. The response of the theorist to his own work is to try and capture the results of it (particles raised by the tests change the color of the sky). One sentence characterizes the person who said it and the person the sentence is about.
• “Detonation theorist,” at least for me, provides an interesting contrast with the rest of the sentence and the setting around it. The specifics associated with painting might be well known to readers (brushes and paint, canvas or houses), but fewer specifics are obviously associated with the work of a detonation theorist. What professions can contrast with hobbies or other activities? “Psychiatrist” and “serial killer” is one example Harris has used. These contrasts can provide an initial kernel of characterization.
• This sentence also demonstrates the possibility of quickly capturing big, philosophical questions. An entire manuscript isn’t necessary to ask about how humans respond to preparing for war or coping with, perhaps, difficult employment. The question can be raised quickly, though resolving or exploring it takes more time.