Hello, writers.
There’s an odd specimen of musical chickenhawkery that usually causes me to hit my car radio dial hard. But yesterday, because I was thinking about the importance of first lines, I didn’t.
The song starts out like this:
If you’re reading this, and mama’s sitting there, looks like I only got a one-way ticket over here.
--Tim Mc Graw
The singer goes on to present some bizarre views of war and religion, the kind of thing that never seems to get written by anyone who’s actually been in a war. But it’s a great opening, of the tried-and-true “if you’re reading this” variety.
“If you’re reading this” conveys that the jig is up, the fat is in the fire, the waste-product has hit the circulating device, and all has not gone according to plan. That, as I’ve said before, is where a story starts—not when your protagonist is about to go over a cliff but when s/he’s already gone over. My writing hero, the late Diana Wynne Jones, was fond of an “if you’re reading this” opening.
Now, let’s talk traditional narrative for a moment. You’re a well-read person. Chances are you’ve read lots of great 19th century literature—every writer should—and you may have read all of Dickens and all of Austen. Possibly several times. So you’re very familiar with openings like this one:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
--Charles Dickens, Bleak House
This clever description of bad weather in London goes on for 935 words. You can imagine the 19th century reader, esconced in a wing chair by the fire, perhaps with an audience of spouse and family gathered around, all enjoying immensely being transported into this thick, foggy morass which they are delighted to discover, on page four, is a metaphor for court proceedings.
Now picture today’s reader, crouching in an airport boarding area, one foot hooked through the strap of her carry-on, announcements blaring on loudspeakers all around her, a giant-screen tv over her head on which Wolf Blitzer is intoning one of his trademark bits of wisdom along the lines of “Australia is located in the southern hemisphere.”
It’s a wonder anyone can read at all in these circumstances. And it gives you some idea of why today’s opening needs to cut to the chase.
So, no descriptions. No scene-setting. Nothing but moving the story forward. (In the opening.)
Last week I asked you to write an opening sentence. There were many wonderful responses. Here’s one among many that I cared for:
When the inn door opened, Cally was behind the bar stabbing an elf.
--GussieFN
What does this opening do? It contains both action and motion forward. Someone (we’ll no doubt find out who in a minute) has opened the door. Something is already going on, and something pretty serious. We don’t know whether Cally’s got a good reason for stabbing the elf or whether the elf will die. We don’t know whether the story’s from Cally’s POV (“Uh oh—caught!”) or from the POV of the person who opened the door (“Cally! What is the meaning of this!”) But we know that the fat is on the fire.
We’ve been provided some backstory, but it’s extremely incidental. (Setting: a bar, at an inn, in a universe that contains elves.) We don’t even know who Cally is. (Let alone his/her age, race, occupation, retirement plans, familial status, et backstory cetera.)
We’ve got nothing we don’t need, and that gives me confidence that the story is going to be crisply told, with no time spent wading around in the kind of heavy details that Victorian audiences loved but modern audiences generally do not.
And there are no adjectives.
You could make a case for “inn” being an adjective, but it would be a tricky case. (Similarly, in the T. McGraw song above, there are no adjectives unless “one-way” is one, which I kind of think it isn’t. I would argue that both “inn door” and “one-way ticket” are actually compound words, as linguistics defines compound words.)
A key to moving the story forward is to deep-six the descriptions, the backstory... the adjectives.
Adjectives drag. Big, red, shiny adjectives drag. Adverbs too. Big, red, shiny adjectives and finicky, storm-tossed adverbs drag weightily, ponderously.
So….
Tonight’s challenge is similar to last week’s with minor changes.
Write the opening line for The Jewel of Togwogmagog. You remember the tale:
A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
The opening can be a line of dialogue if you want. It should not be an info-dump. (Don’t, for example, tell us the character’s full name, age, physical attributes, or employment history.) It should make us want to read further to find out what happens. Ideally, it should place us in the middle of an interesting (perhaps life-threatening) situation, though we don’t need to know all the details in this one line.
The line should contain no adjectives and no description.
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