02.02.07
Struggling for a grabber of an opening
Continuing this subject of opening chapters:
In the newspaper business, grabbing the reader with the “lede” — the first sentence or two — long has been a grail of good writers, and as the attention span of the general reader continues to shrink, it has become ever more important.
A memorable opening sentence, however, is much less important with longer work such as magazine articles and novels — readers of those genres have both more patience and deeper intellect. (Or so we writers like to think.)
One of the most quoted “great opening sentences” of a novel in literary blogs is from Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
The quoters all forget, or choose to ignore, the fact that Burgess was satirizing what he considered the frivolous, even useless, convention of writing a grabber of a first sentence in a novel. He respected his readers’ intellects — and he also knew that he had a large built-in audience he didn’t need to woo.
Look at the opening of Michael Connelly’s latest best-selling thriller, Echo Park: “It was the car they had been looking for. The license plate was gone but Harry Bosch could tell. A 1987 Honda Accord, its maroon paint long faded by the sun . . .”
A clue that leads to an important event, but not a grabber. Connelly doesn’t need one. He knows his readers love Harry Bosch and will eagerly follow him through a thicket of details to the meat.
Relative unknowns (like me) haven’t that luxury. A mystery reviewer or bookstore browser first looks over the flap copy, then checks the opening paragraph. If you can’t get the attention of the critic or browser then, you never will.
I learned that lesson with Season’s Revenge. That first novel begins:
“The people to whom I was born had lived here long before fiercer tribes from the East chased them onto the Great Plains.”
This sentence and the background scene-setting ones that followed would have been OK for a literary novel, but I didn’t get to the corpse until the second paragraph:
“Deep claw marks raked the victim’s grizzled chest and bearded face, twisted in the rictus of sudden and painful death….”
That should have been the opener, with the scene-setting following immediately.
I think I did a little better with the second novel, A Venture into Murder:
“Start at the beginning,” I said, stepping gingerly away from the corpse in the sand. It had a hole in its chest. But Elmer Knapp had none, and he proceeded at full throttle and with a bottomless fuel tank. Mr. Knapp had found the body.”
For the next eleven or twelve paragraphs, however, Knapp rattles on like the garrulous old-timer he is, scattering clues that Deputy Sheriff Steve Martinez patiently jots down, to re-emerge later as the novel progresses.
I thought I was being clever, but in hindsight I should have kept the reader’s attention on the body for a few more paragraphs, then, once the hook was set, let Knapp speak and the clues tumble out.
Maybe I finally got it right on the third try, in A Cache of Corpses (coming in December):
“It’s in the Dying Room,” Jenny Besonen said, voice strained, ample chest heaving. “And it has no head.”
Billy Ciric, her boyfriend, sat disconsolately next to her on a bench in the Poor Farm courtyard, staring at the breakfast he had splashed on the rusty flank of Amos Hoskinen’s tractor.
“What’s up in the Dying Room?” I asked. I was a bit breathless myself, having been yanked a few minutes earlier out of the Porcupine City Health Center, where I had been pumping a stationary bike for nearly an hour, and dispatched in the sheriff’s department’s Explorer out to the scene on State Highway M-38 three miles west of town.
“The body.” Jenny glanced at me almost accusingly, as if I should magically have known the reason for her distress.
“The body?”
“It’s a lady. She’s wrapped in plastic. And she has no head.”
It wasn’t untll the ninth draft of this novel that these paragraphs finally were assembled properly. In the first eight drafts I spent way too much time describing the Poor Farm setting rather than the discovery of the body. It took a nudge from my agent, Elizabeth Winick of McIntosh & Otis, to get me there.
Writing, I discovered a long time ago, is an ongoing — and often painful — process of learning.
