Open for Business--novel openings

Thumbing through a bunch of novels--all varieties--it surprises me at how few make the narrative interesting. They must be decent books. Someone took time to hone it and probably inflicted it on friends and mentors to read. And later, an editor bought it and--one would think--helped hone it further so that you have something interesting happening in the first two pages. Something. I'm not asking for a gunfight or a verbal one, but maybe. Something. 

This scene from Together is amazing on how it engages the viewer, and it's just two people talking to us:

(The first version I watched was cut so that it seemed like she'd just now made this meal for him with the aforementioned mushroom which was even more interesting, but best to cut it since it isn't a part of the movie.)

Presumably the writer has worked harder on his opening than any other part (with the possible exception of the ending), yet as I comb through book after book, here are a bunch of dull starts. I don't get how that's even possible. If I were the editor, the opening would be my first priority. Yes, we need a narrative that flows and makes sense and moves us at the end, but readers have to start somewhere, usually at the beginning.

I used to read Charles Bukowski as a young man--in part because he wasn't me. I liked his devil-may-care attitude, his humor, and his commitment to art despite being destitute and drunk half of his waking life. Honest where most keep silent, he opened life to the seamier side. His perspective should not be construed as matching mine.

But the point here at the beginning of his novel was that it not only hooks but also gets the reader to think about the narrative, about life. He packed more in a few sentences than some writers put into two pages. The following opening from Women isn't the full paragraph but it's enough. Even one sentence is enough, but reader beware. Bukowski is definitely R-rated and not recommended for the woke and the strict religious type--or really anyone who thinks people should only think as they do.

I was 50 years old and hadn't been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility.

Not beautiful, not evocative, but functional. We get character and struggle immediately in the first sentence. Whether the reader feels for his plight is another matter, but that may say as much about the reader as the writer.

One of my all-time favorites is Of Mice and Men. It starts off with two pages of setting (also theme although I didn't notice that until a later reading), and I was never bored. Rereading, I see that on a surface level, it's about the land and about how it's been used by animals and men before of characters enter. It's not what sells me on the book, but it's interesting enough--for a moment. Steinbeck seems aware of what he can get away with and how much: well written and a touch of interest.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rock Galiban mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees–willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees there leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering sound if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ‘coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it.

Simple and effective. 

If you can't sustain my interest for two pages--the two pages you presumably worked hardest on--how can you maintain it for a book? Maybe it picks up later. When you get a sample today, though--you only get ten to twenty pages of the opening--somehow you have to persuade the reader that this book is worth reading. 

I picked these not as exemplary but as simple and effective, picked because they aren't hitting you over the head with their hooks.

A Wake with Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Green Street

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away this year on February 22, 2021, one month shy of reaching 102. He seems to have been producing new material for quite a while. He published a novel in 2019. While it could have been a trunk novel, it's still interesting that a man was capable of producing work that people would publish over a century of living. Apparently, not so much today, but that's another story.

The poem in question (posted online here) is untitled although this website calls it "Green Street"; however, note the formatting does not match the one I read.

My interest in it is how parallels other genres like science fiction. Also, my interest in it was how difficult it was to read it. I had a book of poems to read in spare moments, and for some reason my mind kept slipping off the poem. Probably I was distracted, not ready to focus. I don't blame the writer until I hunker down and focus.

This happens in most genres. There are moments in narrative when your concentration has to be 100% there. In science fiction, usually that's weighted at the front, the steep learning curve for learning how the world works. In mysteries, it's at the end when shifts and surprises can come fast. In poetry, it can be the whole poem. In literary fiction, it's similar, but it's often more nuanced although some experimental stuff may require most of your attention.

Here's the opening line:

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

What's tricky here is this pile up of nouns and adjectives, and what modifies what. "Green" is, in some senses, the most ordinary of these words. It most likely modifies "Street", but that doesn't help much because it could have been named because all the houses were green, or maybe it was covered vegetation, or maybe it was named after someone named Green, and have nothing to do with the color at all. It could also refer to being young, inexperienced, naive or unripe. It's also possible that Green could modify "Mortuary" or "Marching Band" or the whole. Alternately, or in addition, Wallace Stevens added on (at least within the field of poetry) a sense of spice, of creativity, and of color in "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (excerpted here, see link for full poem):

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,

"Street" could mean just a paved avenue, or someone or something raised on or near the street as in "street kids" or "street dogs"--a sense of looking down one's nose can be heard in that. It could also refer to homelessness.

"Mortuary" adds the actual place but also the sense of death and passing on. "Marching" is interesting in that it could serve as part of a verb team (was marching) or a verbal clause (marching in place), but here it's an adjective like "Green," sort of.

"Band" unites the whole--in both definition and action.

Now that's a lot of information to process in one line. You might come up with more. It could be that mortuary marching bands have a place in our society. Maybe this famous one comes to mind:

But for most of us it lies outside our experience. And that jarring sensation between mourning (often the passing of elderly) in a mortuary and celebrating in a marching band (often composed of youth) creates the energy in this poem and in the above movie clip.

It's this energy that drives SF, too. When Elizabeth Bishop misread "mammoth" as "man moth," she wrote a poem. Jack Vance took that strange combination of words and tried to create a different reality.

I recommend reading the whole poem at the link.

Getting into Writers of the Future with Luke Wildman

Luke Wildman--cool surname, no?--and I will share space in the upcoming Writers of the Future anthology. He has a lot of good advice here. He's also recorded a video summarizing and answering questions about the contest:

Put an asterisk on some of the meta-analysis as possibilities but not definites. I may have read few more anthologies, but I hadn't read the most recent in awhile. The "alien" perspective is difficult to achieve and impressive when done well.

The best explanation I've heard or read about entering the contest is this podcast with David Farland/Wolverton, Tim Powers, and Orson Scott Card. This is what I've pointed to when someone asks about the contest.

Part of it is going to be arbitrary. What did everyone else submit? If you and 400 others submit BEM stories, you're competing against all those stories for one slot. This happens in the magazines. I've had friends upset that they miss a market because a magazine published or will publish something like it within the past year or within the next year. You're competing against unknown forces.

The only thing you can do about that is to write what only you can write. Of course, it might be an oddball that stands no chance of publication, but maybe it's something that might catch someone's eye. A couple in the last anthology surprised me--not that I didn't like them but that they were experimental in some aspect.

That leads me to the next point: Traditionally, it has been a place for traditional stories--meat and potatoes. What's showcased is the speculation. Maybe the anthology is changing, though, so pay attention to what it's currently publishing.

If you're going to guess, you might map out the speculative subgenres. See what isn't getting published in the anthologies, and try one of the less traveled subgenres. I guessed in this post that maybe the editors are looking for more elaborate world-building tales (published early accidentally after experiencing a few surprises). In the podcast, Wolverton says he is looking across the breadth and depth of the field. There you go.

 The contest is a great place to test out your stories. See what gets the editor's attention. He hands out different honorable mentions (in 2015 he started "Silver Honorable Mentions") and finalists. What are you doing that might have caught his attention this time that you didn't do before?

Finally, read the anthology, as Luke says. Read at least three or four of them. My personal favorite was L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXIII although there have been several others that came close. Usually all are entertaining where two or three stand out, and a handful of those probably should have made it into the Year's Best anthologies. 

The temptation for a writer is to sneer and say that you wrote something better than story X! I'm afraid that the first time I submitted I probably felt like that. That can be healthy if it spurs you into writing something else and submitting it. After all, that's what got Octavia Butler writing. 

If it keeps you from submitting, though, then steer clear of it. The writers did something right, and your primary job is not to figure out what went wrong as if the story were still in the workshop, but to ask what made it catch the editor's eye. I hope that the analyses here on the blog all do that: something positive, something negative. A little bit yin and a little bit yang. A little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

Feel free to send me your thoughts when the anthology comes out in November.

To all the writers, good luck! To the readers, have fun!