"The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me. The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn’t see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn’t look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn’t that I couldn’t." - Amy Hempel, The Harvest (short story, 1998) This short story's opening have always been one of my favourite. I love how it stars in a simple way, telling us a lot about the character without actually telling us anything about her. The writer hooks you on with these few words and makes you sink deeper and deeper as the story goes on. Simple words, short sentences always get the job done.
Here's the opener to one of my favourite books of all time, the 'children's' classic Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson. A better coming-of-age story I've never read. And while it's an entertaining book for children, it's a cracker for adults, too. With an impeccable story 'voice,' interesting setting (late 1860's Texas) and unforgettable characters, It's a book I re-read often. ........... We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow, a color we called 'yeller' in those days. The other meant that when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark. I remember like yesterday how he strayed in out of nowhere to our log cabin on Birdsong Creek. He made me so mad at first that I wanted to kill him. Then, later, when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks. That's how much I'd come to think of the big yeller dog.
I keep reading this one in a cowboy voice Completely American @peachalulu Really hate that Crusoe one you posted! Phrasing seems ham-fisted for some reason...When was it written, do you know?
Interesting to compare the Crusoe opening with Delderfield's, which also gives details, but in a way that gives you a hint of what's to come. @Mackers - 1719. A good way to see how our understanding of the function of the opening has evolved. Like Opening Theory in chess.
Yes, and it's amazing to see how a writer is like an ocean search - miss by an inch miss by a mile. Delderfield used beautiful imagery and ideas. Crusoe just seems to be stating facts - giving information. But it looked to be the fashion back then - Totally overdone whopper by Eliza Fowler Haywood - called the Fortunate Foundlings written in 1744. It's making Defoes opening look better and better.
This is from John Fante's LA cult classic Ask the Dust, a criminally under-appreciated gem of a book. He heavily influenced Charles Bukowski but he had more heart than Bukowski imo. This book is about a young struggling writer in LA, but it's mostly a love story. There is some real nice touches of humour in it, and there is a real charm about this book. The introduction sums up the kind of stuff a young writer might think! I like the way he berates himself. It's self-deprecating but it's not off-putting This is Charles Dickens in Bleak House. A very vivid opening. Really captures the hustle and bustle of a grey day in a filthy Victorian London...
Yikes...That old archaic style is why I'm sometimes reluctant to venture into books that are that old. It was the style of the time, but takes patience to get through. Even Dickens can take forever to get to the point
I like the Fante one Mackers - a lot of people try for a chummy 1st person opening and kinda bungle it - but this works. Dickens is like the king of visual - I always loved the first glimpse of Miss Havisham in her decaying wedding dress! Ahh Jannert - they told right off the bat Old Yeller was gonna die? Actually that's pretty good - you get to prepare for it. Great example of voice - the author had me with describing the dog opening his head instead of mouth. Michael - good snippet makes me want to check out Hempel's stuff.
@Mackers - "You need a woman, you need a bath, you need a good swift kick, you need money." What a gem of a sentence! Mr. Fante just made his way onto my short list.
@Mackers, that Fante opening is terrific! It's so charged with character, with attitude. I've never heard of the author, but he seems definitely worth looking into!
Here's an interesting one. It's Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel. I like Wolfe's language and his imagery. I like the way he approaches his story from a god's point of view, looking from far off in space and time until he eventually settles down (after about a page and a half) with his first major character, Oliver Gant, stonecutter and father of the book's protagonist. It's an audacious opening, talking abstract philosophy when readers want characters in action, and I admire the courage (folly?) Wolfe must have had to use it so confidently. "My prose alone will draw them in!" he must have said to himself. "They'll see the fire in my soul in the words I write!" The book was first published in 1929 and remains in print to this day. It's an American classic - a strange one, but a classic.
You guys are missing the obvious. “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830) If you think you can write a more tangentially diverse opening sentence you should try the Bulwer-Lytton contest.
I used to have several books of entries into the Bulwer-Lytton contest. Some of the funniest stuff out there! I never entered myself, though. Maybe I should have - some of my early efforts sink to that level.
Like a parking attendant waving his arms in the air and screaming, "you can't park there" they would be saying with just as much irritability (or much much more) that you just.can't.do. that.
Road to Los Angeles is good as well. Dago Red too. He is, I agree, criminally neglected. I think this is because he is a Los Angeles writer and that LA has never had the literary scene or literary magazines that New York or the east coast has had. New York has, of course, the New Yorker, which can really make or break a career. LA has nothing like that. But the list of east coast literary mags is pretty long: The Atlantic, Harpers, Ploughshares, I could go on and on. When I think of LA and literary mags nothing comes to mind. I mean , Bukowski had to get published by Open City; some small time press run out of some dudes basement. I don't know why Los Angeles has never had a good literary magazine or literary scene. Maybe there's just much more attention on scriptwriting in LA compared to literature. There's certainly a lot to write about in LA. Fante was a great LA writer and he was ignored by the American literary establishment. And the American literary establishment is based in New York, a city that couldn't be more different than LA. New York City is dense with individual boroughs, each having their own character. Los Angeles is sprawling with so many parts of the city so cut off from the main metropolis that we are hardly aware of each other. Brooklyn is aware of the Bronx like the caterpillar is aware that the flowers bloom. East Hollywood doesn't know Harbor City exists. LA could sure use a good literary mag though. This city has a lot of stories to tell. The best were told by Fante. If you're ever at the corner of 5th and Grand Ave in Downtown LA look up and you'll see it: JOHN FANTE SQUARE.
Not so much that Old Yeller was going to die—but that Travis was going to be the one to kill him. This is definitely more than a child's story about his pet dog. It annoys me that this gem of a book gets overlooked so often. It's the one book from my childhood that has never lost its appeal for me. I still pick up writing tips from it. A masterclass in simple, honest writing.
I've never been to LA but you get a great sense of the city just by reading Ask the Dust. It's sad that guys like Fante were never recognised by the "literary establishment"...A lot of people have never even heard of him, and that's a shame. The only reason I discovered the book was through a well-known underground publication in the UK called Rebel Inc. It was a champion of underground forgotten classics, and through the work that they did I managed to find quirky authors like the American Richard Brautigan (The Confederate General from Big Sur is a riot of a book), and darker classics like Knut Hamsun's Hunger, which is a compelling but highly depressing read.
Another day another few examples The perfect opening sequence in The Great Gatsby (More than a paragraph but as an opening sequence it's worth quoting in full) This has a sheer virtuosity of style. Eloquent and insightful. You get a sense of the affluence which is threaded through the entire book. I particularly like the line, 'for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. ' Here's something a bit more lowbrow - This is from a short story by the contemporary Irish writer Kevin Barry. It's called Berlin Arkonaplatz - My Lesbian Summer. The opening made me chuckle when I first read it. It's a cheeky one. This is from Iain Banks' excellent novel The Wasp Factory. It was mentioned to me by another WF member. I would definitely recommend it. There are a couple of intriguing curiosities with such a short opening. You wonder what the hell are the "sacrifice poles"...You know his brother has escaped from somewhere (either convict or mental patient)...And the factory told him his brother escaped (Paranoia? You think the narrator might not be too sane himself)
I was introduced to the Blood Meridian only a few months ago, and I’m still on the fence, do I love it or hate it? The prose is mesmerizing, but I still need to be in a particularly attentive state of mind to really make the most out of it. We picked apart just one paragraph in our Master’s Thesis seminar (one guy wrote his thesis about it), and that alone spurred a lot of discussion and speculation. Anyway, I like the beginning because it demands my attention right away. There’s the imperative that commands me to look where Cormac McCarthy is pointing: I agree that if someone had posted the snippet here as a test and we didn’t know it was his, some might bash it, perhaps call it over-complex or even too artsy. Most of the students in my seminar course actually intensely disliked McCarthy. He isn’t as famous over here as he’s in the US, not sure if it matters. Thinking about all the rules and everything when it comes to starting a novel, I wanted to add here one beginning that breaks them to a degree, although it does start with a bang. From the novel, Dina’s Book by Herbjorg Wassmo (1989), trans. by Nadia Christensen: It breaks some “rules” by using two exclamation marks, but the beginning caught my attention and I wanted to know what happened, why is the sleigh sliding down? And there’s someone on it, and they crash against a rock, yet why is she thinking about fall and horses? Why isn’t the person on the sleigh screaming for help? The author also shows the setting; a cold, dangerous, mountainous place where winter comes early or falls are particularly icy, and the time; this probably happens in the past because there is a horse and a sleigh. This is also part of the prologue, but for me it works as it introduces an important scene, even though the reader doesn’t know yet why it’s so important. Later the story returns to Dina’s childhood and starts to recount a terrible childhood trauma, but I like it how the author elevated this scene above all and allowed it to start the novel. Of course, later the reader finds out why it’s so pivotal and the reasons behind someone sliding helplessly into a gorge. The novel is mostly in 3rd person omniscient, but here and there the reader gets snippets of Dina’s disjointed thoughts. On the other hand, I can see why it might turn readers off. For one, it’s a translation, which is already enough for some people to feel deterred. Also, the first sentence is quite long. Then there’s the depersonalization of the person on the sleigh. We get neither the sex nor the name. It could leave the reader feeling aloof and confused. However, to me it did what good beginnings do: raised questions, made me want to know what events led to such tragedy. I'm not too precious about beginnings, to be honest, as I often do read the blurb as well, but here I really like the beginning.
All of these are lovely. =) One of my favorites is the opening to E.M. Forester's "A Passage to India." The description really pulls you in. "Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off —the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest..."
The opening from Homer's The Odyssey. When I saw this prompt and read through the different replies, I immediately thought of this poem/story. It is a story that has stuck with me for quite awhile and I had read it quite a few times many years ago. It's been awhile since I've picked it up, so I was curious to see how the opening was and if that had anything to do with my love for the story. I'm not sure if it is because I know the story that is about to unfold or not, but I think it is a grand opening! I am immediately curious to know more about this relentless hero and the adventures that he and his crew embarked upon. Not to mention those darn meddling gods--always brining the drama! It's almost like a verbal movie trailer for the rest of the epic poem. I'm hooked and have now put it any my bedside table to read later.... What do you think?
