Being the second part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”

As mentioned last week, I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:

1. Engage the reader immediately.
2. Do not drown the reader in information. 
3. Introduce important characters and plots early. 
4. Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative. 
5. Shape early action toward later plot points.

This week, let’s look at the first Big Idea: Engage the reader immediately.

Engagement

Sometimes the very first sentence is memorable and therefore remarkable. 

Marley was dead: to begin with. —A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

It was love at first sight. —Catch-22, by Joesph Heller

Call me Ishmael. —Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

More commonly, the first sentence is simply the most direct way to start a brief passage, perhaps a page or two, that leads us into a compelling story. 

It used to be common practice to start a story slowly and indirectly. Thus, Miguel de Cervantes:

In a village in la Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember, an hidalgo lived not long ago, one of those who keeps a lance on the rack, an old leather shield, skinny nag and swift greyhound. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and rashers of bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, some squab added on Sundays—these consumed three-fourths of his income.  The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. . . .

Leisurely, you might say. 

Or how about this opening, from Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a popular middle-grade novel in the Misty Eons, when Your New Favorite Writer was a lad:

Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.

A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him . . . .

This kind of opening has gone out of fashion, under the dual impetus of cinematic experiences and the mad pace of modern society. 

These days, the Done Thing is to start in medias res. In plain English, start in the middle of things. For example: 

The rain came again, harder this time. Charlotte pulled her knit hat tight, pushed up the collar of her gray wool coat, and stared through the chicken wire at the rabbits. Kate’s prize rabbits.

She entered the pen and chose a plump one, furry and warm in her cold hands. Its heart thumped like a tiny sewing machine. Charlotte brought it into the dim barn and stroked its fur until it calmed, trusting. She hesitated a moment—stealing from my own daughter—then picked up the butcher knife.

When she cut the jugular, the sewing machine stopped. . . . —from The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna

By adopting a deep third-person limited viewpoint and starting the story in the middle of traumatic action, the author engages the reader at a visceral level while also sketching salient traits of the main character—who is, in this case, both cold-blooded and conscience-stricken at the same time. 

The technique of starting in medias res may even be used to involve the audience in action that is no part of the story—as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. The initial sequence, with Bond electrocuting an antagonist in a bathtub, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Doesn’t matter: The audience is still recovering from the unseemly frying when we cut to a cool and collected Bond entering the office and flirting with Miss Moneypenny. 

Alternative Methods

There’s no actual Law, Dear Reader, that says you have to start your story in medias res. I do recommend, however, that you start in medias somethingus. For example, here is the way British author J.R.R. Tolkien began his fantasy classic The Hobbit:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it – and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

This is masterful technique. Bear in mind, Gentle Reader, that in 1937, when Tolkien sprung this book on an unsuspecting world, nobody had ever heard of a hobbit. It was a brand-new concept. 

In fact, most of his readers probably bought the book because the title intrigued them and they wanted to find out what a hobbit was. 

So, in his first sentence, Tolkien mentions both a hole in the ground and a hobbit. And then, in the second sentence, he begins to tell the reader about the hole!

“No, no, Mister author! Tell us about the hobbit! We want to know about the hobbit. Never mind the hole.” 

But Tolkien procoeeds unperturbed through a long paragraph about the arrangement, layout, and furnishings of the hole. At last he moves on to a little trove of information about hobbits in general, and about the family to which this particular hobbit belongs. And little by little, we find out all we need to know about the hobbit: He is risk-averse, and he’s about to have an adventure. 

At this point, Gracious Reader, what choice do you have but to read the rest of the book? 

The Hook

It’s what we sometimes call a hook. The hook is that we know Bilbo Baggins is constitutionally averse to adventure, yet the author assures us he is about to have an adventure, like it or not. And the author goes one step further, challenging us to figure out whether the hobbit “gained anything in the end.”

A reader would have to be made of stone to resist that hook. 

The hook in the prior example, Wisconsin author Lucy Sanna’s brilliant historical novel The Cherry Harvest, is somewhat different. We are drawn into Charlotte’s world in a very close and compelling way. We experience with her the slaying of a rabbit, along with the guilt that accompanies it. We understand, through the author’s skill at narration, that Charlotte has been forced into this dire situation. The rest of the novel is about the larger situation Charlotte faces and how she handles it.

A Whiff of Death

Besides the general advice to begin in medias res or in medias somethingus, I have one other little suggestion for engaging the reader immediately: Contrive to place a whiff of death somewhere on the first or second page.

Why is that a good idea? We would rather read a story with life-or-death consequences than one with less serious outcomes. We not only need, as Donald Maass suggests, “conflict on every page”; that conflict must have high stakes. Life or death. Nothing less. Otherwise, why are we reading this book?

It may be that the chronology of your story does not allow for an actual death, or even a close brush with death, in the first pages. Never mind. It is enough to include a sentence or phrase that reminds the reader there is such a thing as death. That will be enough. 

Lucy Sanna in The Cherry Harvest shows us the actual death of a small animal, foreshadowing very real risks of human death for the human characters in the novel. In Tolkien’s case, it does not suit his purpose to have a death occur in the first pages. But he does use the word “adventure,” which is a code word for “serious risk of death.”

That’s enough. Just something, that’s all you need.

Next week: How to avoid drowning the reader in information.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer