Tag: Story

The Art of First Sentences

When I sat down to write this morning, one topic refused to be ignored.

That topic? First sentences.

I first learned about the magic of first sentences from an essay by the great (and late) SF writer Edward Bryant. If you have not heard of him, it’s because he specialized in short stories and anthologies. I aspire to write like him, even though his stories were macabre and his happy endings equivocal. Cinnabar, one of his anthologies, was one of my formative reading experiences in high school.  He wrote wonderful female characters that put Heinlein’s accomplished pinups to shame. (Yes, I read Friday, and it scarred me — sex symbol spy decides what she really wants to be is a mother. Madonna/whore much?)

Anyhow, Edward Bryant wrote an essay about the importance of first sentences in writing. They exist pique curiousity, to suck the reader in, and set the stage for the story. He cites one example from an anonymous author in a workshop that he considered perfect: “Today the Pope forgot to take her Pill.” I don’t know about you, but I’m angry that that book was never written, because I’ll never know the end of it.

The sentence I wore on my arms for Dear World makes for a good first sentence: I wrote a love song to a sparrow”. For God’s sake, why??? Now you’re invested in the story.

I work hard to come up with good first sentences. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes I forget that I’m supposed to put work into that first sentence. This morning, I looked at the first page of my WIP, and saw that the first sentence started with “Once upon a time”. It made sense in one way, because someone was telling what looked like a fairy tale, but yuck. That sentence is anemic, trite, and uninspiring. The new first sentence?

When the storyteller finally spoke, her voice took on a tone that reached from my past and echoed into my future. 

The beauty of that sentence is that it’s the key to the book.
The other beauty of that sentence is that it belies the revelation half a page down that Mom is telling the story and it’s supposed to be a child’s bedtime story.
But the story reaches into the protagonist’s past and echoes into her future.

"I wrote a love song to a sparrow"

I didn’t tell the story I thought I’d tell.

No stories about hardship, no stories about resilience. Somehow, the Dear World storytelling process got to my inner core in less than twenty minutes.

I told a story about love, creativity, and sparrows.

When I was a child, I talked to sparrows. And trees. And squirrels. Mr. Shady Tree lived down the street from me. He had been trimmed to look like a child’s lollipop tree. Now and again I would stop by to visit him. I would offer him invisible TV Dinners and banana splits. He never spoke to me but I felt a sense of comfort talking to him. I talked to the birds in his branches, too. I remember the sparrows best — they were flighty sorts, hopping in small groups from branch to branch, then scattering when cars drove by.

I quickly gathered a reputation from my classmates for being “weird”, and this led to a lot of harassment on their part and a lot of shame on mine. I cared less and less about their “normal”. I isolated myself rather than face the shame.

When I hit adolescence, I discovered more beauty in my world — boys. I felt as if I could study every inch of their faces — their skin, translucent or spotty, their eyes, the truth behind their cryptic scribbles in their notebooks. I could never draw them, never even remember their faces. So I wrote poems. In junior high, I showed the poems to my best friend, and she raised the window sash and announced my crush to everyone outside during lunch. I would spend the time between classes being admonished by the other girls that So-and-So wouldn’t possibly like me back.

The two lived together in shame in my mind — birds and crushes.

One day in college, I wrote a love song about a sparrow. I confess, it wasn’t really about a sparrow — it was about a young man on a bus. He had long, honey-brown hair and round glasses and a faint dusting of freckles and a strong, curved nose. His build was delicate, bird-boned. The rain had drenched him as it had me, but he looked at home in a misty forest, and out-of-place on that grimy bus.

So I wrote the song. Looking back, I had a revelation about this song —  no, two: I had found a way to both talk about my strange reality where birds and trees could understand human speech and maybe even take one on a journey, and I had found a way to talk about crushes without revealing them. I also found acceptance for myself as the child who others found “weird”.

Oh, the song? Here it is:

CHORUS:
Pretty, pretty –
I would not take your feathers,
I would not steal your flight,
I only want to watch you
Spin stars into the night
I’d love to hear your stories,
I wonder where you’ve been,
I wonder where you’re going to
Pretty, pretty.
Who am I to seek you out –
A child who talks to birds.
I’d love to tell you something,
But I stumble on the words.
The poetry of birdsong,
The music of your voice
I wonder where you’re going to
CHORUS
And where am I to look for you?
I’ve squinted at the trees
To watch the flutter of your wings
Float past me on the breeze
The poetry of birdsong,
The music of your voice
I wonder where you’re going to
CHORUS
And who am I to seek you out –
A child who talks to birds.
I’d love to tell you something,

But I stumble on the words.

The part I’m most proud of today

I wrote 3600 words today to make up for the 2500 words (yes, I’m aiming for 3000 words, 4000 words on weekends) yesterday, and probably to make up for the fact that I didn’t win NaNo last year. 29,000 words so far.

Here’s my favorite segment of the day — an indigent with mental illness tells a story. Remember this is a rough draft. Really rough:

*********

Pagan paused again for a long time, cocking his head. Then, his voice became that of a child’s, and he spoke:

“I am supposed to be one of them, but instead I got put into the hospital. It was after I woke up, after I started existing. I woke up in a room, and a woman started screaming. I ran outside, and all these big machines tried to kill me, and everything was loud. I started screaming, like the woman. They took me to this white  place, the hospital, and tied me down. Then she told me she was like me, and we were their abandoned children. That’s what she told me, the one who talks in my head. 

“‘Who are they?’ I asked her in her head.

“‘The ones who wander. Sometimes they make us by accident, sometimes on purpose. We are them and we are humans, so they abandoned us.’

“The people who tied me down asked me questions I couldn’t understand: What my name was, where I lived, who my next of kin was. All I could answer with was ‘I’m them and I’m human,’ because those were all the words that I had.

“They untied me, but they kept me in that bright room, and occasionally something would make their name known to me. Someone in white would come into my room and ask me if I wanted the lamp turned on, and I knew ‘lamp’ and ‘on’, and then ‘light’ and ‘food’ and ‘bathroom’

“But I understood the voice from the moment I heard it, because it didn’t talk in words, but in meanings, and it was words I didn’t understand.

“’Who are they?’ I asked again. ‘Who are the ones who wander?’

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“She would not answer me.”

******
This will become important later.