Writer's Corner

In the Beginning
By Catherine Mulvany

Blah beginnings.  One of the most common and—hallelujah!—most easily remedied mistakes we writers make is starting our stories off at a snail’s pace.  We describe things—the characters, the setting, even the action—down to the tiniest detail.  We pile on backstory like dedicated little gardeners shoveling on manure.  We explain, explain, explain things to death.  And the end result?  We bore our readers.  Or rather, we would bore our readers if we had any readers, other than our loyal and long-suffering mothers, of course.  The sad truth is if your beginning is lackluster, no editor is going to read far enough to discover the explosive power of your climax, pun intended.

Not sure  what constitutes a blah beginning?  How about a big fat literary cliché?  Consider, for example, this opening line from Dark Reflections, an early work of one of my favorite authors, Catherine Mulvany:  A summer thunderstorm, the grand daddy of all thunderstorms, raged beyond the walls of the house, screaming in fury, threatening vengeance.

Sound familiar?  It should.  It’s a grossly overwritten, melodramatic version of that old chestnut “It was a dark and stormy night.”   

But did I realize what I’d done?  No, I’m ashamed to say, not until my teenaged daughter read it and went into hysterics.  “You write just like Snoopy, Mom,” she managed to say in between whoops of laughter.

Or how about this example from Blood Ties, another early work from the same red-faced author?  The phone rang just as Shea McKenzie was leaving her cabin for the fireworks.

Not only is the phone call a cliché, the sentence itself is pretty ho-hum, not as pitiful as the first example, just average.  And average doesn’t sell.

So what does sell?  I dug through my keepers for some good examples of killer opening lines.  Here are a few of my favorites:

“At first, Officer Jim Chee had felt foolish sitting on the roof of the house of some total stranger.” –Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns

Hillerman startles the reader with the unexpected.  Why is Chee sitting on a roof, let alone the roof of some stranger?

“There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever.” – Janet Evanovich, One for the Money

Humor is Evanovich’s strength and it certainly comes through here.  Her subject has universal appeal as well.  Every woman’s known a jerk or two in her life.  I, for one, can certainly relate.  Tell me more.

“Summer, that vicious green bitch, flexed her sweaty muscles and flattened Innocence, Mississippi.” –Nora Roberts, Carnal Innocence

Wow!  Not only has Roberts written a sentence that’s technically brilliant, she’s already explained the “innocence” part of her title.  Now, I wonder, where does “carnal” come in?

“I feel compelled to report that at the moment of death, my entire life did not pass before my eyes in a flash.” – Sue Grafton, “I” is for Innocence

Grafton takes a hackneyed expression and gives it a clever twist.  This is first person, but she’s relating what happened at the moment of her death?  What’s going on here?  Inquiring minds want to know.

“Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on US 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston.” – Stephen King, The Stand

King’s setting us up.  He plunks us down in the boonies, insinuating that nothing exciting could possibly happen at a hole-in-the-wall dump like Hapscomb’s Texaco.  Yeah, right.  So why are my thumbs pricking up a storm?

“On an afternoon in April, when rags of dirty snow twisted about the blackened tree trunks and the wind off the wrinkled gunmetal harbor blew in chilly puffs between the buildings, Vanessa walked home from the public library with five books in each arm." – Elisabeth Ogilvie, The Seasons Hereafter

Few writers can match the sheer beauty of Ogilvie’s elegant prose.  With a few deft strokes she sketches her protagonist against the background of a Maine seacoast town at the tag end of winter.  Vanessa is braving the elements to feed her lust for books.  What fuels such desperate need?

“Tom Winchester didn’t mind being thirty-six.” – Kathleen Gilles Seidel, After All These Year

Oh, sure.  If he didn’t mind, then why bring it up in the first place?  I’m hooked.

These examples vary in style, tone, and subject matter, but not one is boring, banal, or ordinary.  All of them immediately drew me into the imaginary world the author had created.

Remember how I said at the start that a blah beginning was one of the most easily remedied problems of beginning writers?  Okay, so I exaggerated.  Nothing about writing is easy.  But crafting great beginnings isn’t as hard as writing a love scene that strikes the right balance between sensuality and emotion or coming up with a believable conflict strong enough to sustain a book for four hundred pages.  It isn’t as hard as research.  It isn’t as hard as writing a synopsis.

Great beginnings intrigue readers.  Great beginnings make us want to read more to find out what happens next.  So here’s the magic formula:  Start your story with a bang.  Don’t hold back.  Use every weapon at your disposal.  Don’t worry about running out of ammunition before you run out of story.  It doesn’t work that way.  Creativity is more like a munitions factory than a munitions dump.  Our tricky little brains eternally devise new and more lethal weapons.

Need a little more inspiration?  Check out the Nora Roberts example again.  Not only did she make effective use of a metaphor, comparing summer to a sweaty bitch, she also combined this with a powerful verb.  In a single sentence she described the setting and set the tone of the book.  This is excellent writing from a gifted storyteller.

So how do we lesser mortals measure up?  Well, if you’re dissatisfied with your beginnings, I suggest you visit your own keeper shelf, your neighborhood book store, or the nearest library.  Reread the opening lines of some of your favorite writers.  In addition to authors in the examples above, you may want to check out Jennifer Crusie, Laura Kinsale, Mary Stewart, Barbara Michaels, Marlys Millhiser, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips, all masters of the beginning line.  Study their techniques.  Try writing a few examples in their styles.  Then go back to your own work, your own style, and apply what you’ve learned.

I did, and here are the results, not perfect certainly, but much improved:

“Smith Halsey gunned his Harley down Main Street, a smile on his face and murder on his mind.” – To Die For

“Once upon a time in a faraway land where knights were short and days were long, there lived a princess of unrivaled ugliness.” – No Prince Charming

“If her ex-husband had had better handwriting, Summer Cheney never would have found herself looking down the barrel of her own .38 Special.” –  Dance with the Devil

“The dead woman walked into Dixon Yano’s office a little after three on Monday afternoon.” – Upon a Midnight Clear

Good luck with your own great beginnings!

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