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.
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