APB-SAL is a blog about education, science, science education, fiction, science fiction, literature, literary stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes the blogger's fancy. NOTE: This blog interrogates art. It rarely make moral proclamations. For that attend the church or politician of your choice. This blog concerns aesthetics, not propaganda. Consider this as interviews with books where the interviewer presents interviewees, so you get what you need to do your own thinking.
"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face."
--Ursula K. Le Guin, "Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness"
"The difference between a short story and a novel comes to this...."
"It is in sf stories that sf action occurs; it is in sf novels the worlds occur.... Crisis is the key to story-writing,a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happening so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out... usually.... But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character. This need not happen in a story, especially a short one.... [T]his makes clear why some writers can write stories but not novels, or novels but not stories.... [A]nything can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event.... As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do--not what he would like them to do. This is one one hand the strength of the novel and on the other its weakness."
--Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick [originally 1968, so probably from the 1969 collection, The Preserving Machine.
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.
"In the case of the novels, the synopsis is much longer. For High-Rise, it was about twenty-five thousand words, written in the form of a social worker’s report on the strange events that had taken place in this apartment block, an extended case history.... By synopsis I... mean... a running narrative in the perfect tense with the dialogue in reported speech, and with an absence of reflective passages and editorializing."-- J.G. Ballard in the Paris Review interview
"Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves, one generates a set of working mythologies, like tales of gold invented to inspire a crew. I assume one is dealing with a process very close to that of dreams, a set of scenarios devised to make sense of apparently irreconcilable ideas. Just as the optical centers of the brain construct a wholly artificial three-dimensional universe through which we can move effectively, so the mind as a whole creates an imaginary world that satisfactorily explains everything, as long as it is constantly updated."-- J.G. Ballard in the Paris Review interview
"[T]he problem of the novel is to stay truthful.... [It] has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it."-- Ray Bradbury from a Paris Review interview
