Blog Post: Play to Your Strengths

[From Our Blog]

New blog post by Claire G – discussions in this thread, please
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Be Up-Front

Agent Pete often says that writers should play to their strength and put it front and centre in the opening of their novel. It sounds so obvious but this hadn’t occurred to me before I heard him say it. Are you good at dialogue? Open with a conversation. Do you excel at action? Start with a bang. Emotion, setting description, characterisation…whatever you’re great at, get it in early. Hook the reader from line one. Make them desperate to read on. Isn’t that what we all want?



Examples

Characterisation

“Call me Ishmael,” Herman Melville writes in the opening of Moby Dick and we know we’re in for a passage of super first-person characterisation.

Likewise, Scout’s way of introducing Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird tells us much about both characters: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow,” she begins, going on to reveal much about her brother from her description of his lack of self-consciousness regarding his subsequent asymmetry and her thoughts about the events which led up to the incident.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” J.D. Salinger’s introduction to Holden Caulfield is memorable because while claiming not to want to describe who he is, his attitude reveals that very thing!

January: An Exceptionally Bad Start. Sunday 1 January. 129 lbs (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year), cigarettes 22, calories 5424… Helen Fielding’s intro to Bridget Jones. Says it all, really.

Setting

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Dickens states in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, and we know that the scene is about to be set.

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women of the house knew it and so did the children.” Toni Morrison evokes a sense of both place and atmosphere in this striking opening.

“Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again.” Daphne Du Maurier breaks the ‘don’t open with a dream’ rule but hey, it works!

And Just Plain Fantastic

I think that what I like about these openings is the element of the unexpected:

“The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move” – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams)

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect” – Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” – I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

Wow. Just wow.



Experience

I’ll admit, I don’t think about my openings much when I first sit down to write. They tend to arrive fully formed in my brain. Only later do I go back and try to analyse what makes them work (or not). In The Strange Imagination of Pippa Clayton, I’ve broken the cardinal rule of ‘don’t start with a character looking in the mirror’ (an early attempt at characterisation). In Daisy Roberts is Dead, I start with action – a car crash. In Sanity begins with dialogue – something that I enjoy writing (perhaps a strength of mine, but who am I to judge? Just because I enjoy writing it doesn’t mean I’m any good at it!). All Inclusive starts with three women observing each other on a plane (again, characterisation, but perhaps more subtle than our introduction to Pippa – therefore better?). My favourite opening is probably the one I wrote for Catfish:

“My name is Catarina Fish. Cat Fish.

I ate some once.

A wild one, not farmed.

Didn’t like it.

It tasted, well, fishy.

And muddy.

Like the bottom-dweller it was.

Spending its life feeding off the dark and murky river bed.

A scavenger, feasting low on the food chain.

Bottom-dweller also means low-life.

Catfish also means identity thief.

Huh.”



Final Thoughts

How do you open your novels? What is/are your strength/s?

Do you have a favourite opening from a published novel? What is it? And what makes it so compelling?
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By @Claire G
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…

 

[Rich.]

I love your Catfish opening. It has a raconteur quality that hooks immediately.

I've only completed one novel (a historical fantasy), and it started like this:

Lady Blackross pushed open the door to the girls’ dormitory and raised her oil lantern in a shaking fist. The light burned her eyes, paraffin stink filled her nostrils and sweat-slicked gooseflesh itched beneath her taffeta gown. It was always like this when she needed a child to kill.
She turned up the lantern’s wick.​

The child Liberty stood barefoot in the centre of the room, expressionless, one foot curled over the other, hair wild and nightdress unkempt. A glass-eyed puppet dangled from her hand. At eight years old, she was the most adept of the school’s few children. In point of fact, she was the first among them, the original and the best. Not that it was important. The kill was all that mattered now.​

Which is pretty (unashamedly) pulpy, but I suppose it sets up character, place and a pre-electric-light time period. If I were to write this now, I'd cut some adjectives. It does create tension, I think (which, in the interest of soothing, I shall release: no, the child isn't about to be killed; Lady B needs a killer) And it suggests mystery. Does that mean it works, or is it simply workmanlike?

A long-suffering work in progress, also fantasy, starts like this:

Mountains are good at waiting. And these mountains had much to wait for. They were naked, for a start, denuded of trees, like the land all around, an island continent bereft of trunk, bough and twig. The people did it, of course. Always people. Hacking and burning, carving and joining, until the last tree was felled, leaving the mountains naked from root to crown (their crowns had always been naked – how else were the people to recognize their sovereigns?).​

The naked mountains watched. And they waited. But not for much longer.​

Which is what, a voice, a place, a tone, the promise of the fantastical? There's mystery, I think.

And a more recent short story (historical fantasy again) that wants to be longer starts like this:

Sitting out east of Brighton Marine Palace and Pier, way out on top of the cliffs at Black Rock, on a freezing cold Tuesday morning in the winter of 1899, was a bleedin’ stupid place for a cabby to be sat. Weren’t no fares to be had, not one. Even the horse was miserable. All the good fares would be up the station coming off the 8:15 from London Bridge or down the Old Stein going about their morning’s business. All there was out Black Rock at that time of day, at that time of year, was crashing waves, screaming gulls, and the stink of bad eggs from the gasworks. At least the sun was out, Henry Redman had noted, eventually, when he’d torn, briefly, his eyes away from the tiny hourglass cradled in the palm of his hand. At least the heavens weren’t as black as his heart on this God-forsaken day, he’d thought, a day he was coming to believe might be his last. And he still hadn’t noticed his missis, out from delivering a dress to a lady in Kemptown, little Bert in tow and her belly fat with their second babe. She was calling up at him, words whipped in the wind, from not six feet away, as he sat hunched on the driver’s board watching the sand in his hourglass filling up one bulb while unceasingly emptying the other.​

Carrie’s voice finally pierced his reverie. “For the love of God, man, stop your daydreaming and help me up there!”​

This is me trying to write a verbose narrator. I don't know what I think about it yet, but it has that pulpy thing again, and mystery, I hope.

I probably haven't got my work in front of enough readers to know my own strengths yet.

As for openings I like in the work of others, I'm pretty forgiving, but I am a sucker for mystery and wonder. I don't need to be instantly hooked, but I do like at least a hint that things are afoot. One of my favourite stories is Guy Gavriel Kay's duology The Sarantine Mosaic, the first book of which, Sailing to Sarantium, starts like this:

Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiently so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth.​

It is a failing of the profession.​

Which is many things (it starts with weather! and hang the rules!), but mostly I think it's a place and a time, and a promise of wonder, that thing I most enjoy in storytelling. It's also very meta. Kay has said, "None of us are perfectly accurate when we work with history (for many, many reasons) which is one reason I like my ‘quarter turn’ to the fantastic . . . it acknowledges right from the outset that we can’t get it exactly right. [...] I like that the reader and I thus share this awareness."* So, for me at least, this opening is compelling because it hints at bigness of story, of wit, of wonder, and – upon further readings – it tickles the intellectual fancy as well.

I aspire to this kind of thing, which suggests that I should be a little less pulpy in my own work, perhaps [are you plagued (like me) by the nagging doubt that you're only ever aping your heroes?]. Do you read similar stories to those you write? And do you need an immediate wow, or are you content to let a story draw you in more slowly?


* from an interview with Kay in ClarkesWorld magazine, answer 3.

 

[Claire G]

Love your examples! I never used to need an immediate 'wow', but lately if a book doesn't grip me straight away I don't persevere with it (I think it's a dwindling attention span thing). It saddens me because I used to be a prolific reader and almost never left a book unfinished. Thanks for the thought-provoking reply xx

 

[Sedayne]

Mountains are good at waiting is a great opening line @Rich.

And Catfish's opening really pulls me in.

For years I was writing a novel in my head with the opening line:

She took it as a sign the day she met the nuns in the family planning aisle of Boots.

Twenty-something years later when I started to write properly, I still wanted this as my opener, but it wouldn't work. It's now the first line of a chapter somewhere half-way through the third book of a trilogy.

My current opener is:

The day Hannah’s dad died was the same day she started her period.

But this may change as I worry that talk of menstruation at the very start might put off at least 49% of the population.

Like Claire, I never used to worry about opening lines when reading books. I go for the feel or the voice of the first few paragraphs or pages. Because there's nothing more disappointing than a great first line which has nothing else on the page to match it.
But perhaps all our attention spans are getting shorter. And to get noticed by agents and publishers long before any 'real' readers look at it, that first line has to be as attention-grabbing as it can be.

 

[Rich.]

It is a pity, I think, that so much now is click-baity, but I do concede the commercial imperative!

 

[Trey]

New blog post by Claire G – discussions in this thread, please
---

Be Up-Front

Agent Pete often says that writers should play to their strength and put it front and centre in the opening of their novel. It sounds so obvious but this hadn’t occurred to me before I heard him say it. Are you good at dialogue? Open with a conversation. Do you excel at action? Start with a bang. Emotion, setting description, characterisation…whatever you’re great at, get it in early. Hook the reader from line one. Make them desperate to read on. Isn’t that what we all want?



Examples

Characterisation

“Call me Ishmael,” Herman Melville writes in the opening of Moby Dick and we know we’re in for a passage of super first-person characterisation.

Likewise, Scout’s way of introducing Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird tells us much about both characters: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow,” she begins, going on to reveal much about her brother from her description of his lack of self-consciousness regarding his subsequent asymmetry and her thoughts about the events which led up to the incident.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” J.D. Salinger’s introduction to Holden Caulfield is memorable because while claiming not to want to describe who he is, his attitude reveals that very thing!

January: An Exceptionally Bad Start. Sunday 1 January. 129 lbs (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year), cigarettes 22, calories 5424… Helen Fielding’s intro to Bridget Jones. Says it all, really.

Setting

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Dickens states in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, and we know that the scene is about to be set.

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women of the house knew it and so did the children.” Toni Morrison evokes a sense of both place and atmosphere in this striking opening.

“Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again.” Daphne Du Maurier breaks the ‘don’t open with a dream’ rule but hey, it works!

And Just Plain Fantastic

I think that what I like about these openings is the element of the unexpected:

“The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move” – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams)

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect” – Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” – I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

Wow. Just wow.



Experience

I’ll admit, I don’t think about my openings much when I first sit down to write. They tend to arrive fully formed in my brain. Only later do I go back and try to analyse what makes them work (or not). In The Strange Imagination of Pippa Clayton, I’ve broken the cardinal rule of ‘don’t start with a character looking in the mirror’ (an early attempt at characterisation). In Daisy Roberts is Dead, I start with action – a car crash. In Sanity begins with dialogue – something that I enjoy writing (perhaps a strength of mine, but who am I to judge? Just because I enjoy writing it doesn’t mean I’m any good at it!). All Inclusive starts with three women observing each other on a plane (again, characterisation, but perhaps more subtle than our introduction to Pippa – therefore better?). My favourite opening is probably the one I wrote for Catfish:

“My name is Catarina Fish. Cat Fish.

I ate some once.

A wild one, not farmed.

Didn’t like it.

It tasted, well, fishy.

And muddy.

Like the bottom-dweller it was.

Spending its life feeding off the dark and murky river bed.

A scavenger, feasting low on the food chain.

Bottom-dweller also means low-life.

Catfish also means identity thief.

Huh.”



Final Thoughts

How do you open your novels? What is/are your strength/s?

Do you have a favourite opening from a published novel? What is it? And what makes it so compelling?
---

By @Claire G
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…

Love this blog post. Thanks, Claire. My favourite opening of any of my own novels is one that'll stay in a drawer. Children's SFF.
'Do you remember, before there were humans, before there were lions and onions, even before there were dinosaurs? The Ush remember.'
There are so many to list from other novels, I do love the opening to Fight Club - paraphrasing from memory:
'The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about fight club'.

And another novel by Palahniuk (which isn't as good as FC, but has a great start: 'Testing, testing, one, two, three. Testing, testing, one, two, three. Maybe this is working, I don't know. If you can even hear me, I don't know. But if you can hear me, listen....'

Strange Sally Diamond 'Put me out with the bins,' he said. 'When I die, put me out with the bins. I'll be dead, so i won't know any different.'
Mickey 7 'I was looking at a rock. It looked like a monkey.'/'Stupidest death ever.'

 

[Peyton Stafford]

Love your examples! I never used to need an immediate 'wow', but lately if a book doesn't grip me straight away I don't persevere with it (I think it's a dwindling attention span thing). It saddens me because I used to be a prolific reader and almost never left a book unfinished. Thanks for the thought-provoking reply xx

I hold out for the wow. Reading, to me, is like sex, or like love. I should stay story is like sex. Rapid transmission of information back and forth. Megabytes in glances. Lifetimes in seconds. Eternal unions in hugs. I continue my childhood practice of reading books from cover to cover, from reveal to revelation. My attention span expands into multiple lifetimes.