To begin with…
A few weeks before The Boat People hit shelves, I served as a reader for the CBC’s annual short fiction contest. This meant I was reading hundreds of anonymous submissions while hunch-backed on the couch.
“Every other story begins with a character waking up from a dream,” I grumbled to my husband. To which, he replied: “Your book starts like that too.”
It was not an Oprah ah-hah moment so much as an oh shit, stop the presses moment. Once you know the cliche, you will notice it everywhere. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about openings and how to craft ones that hook and hold.
Context & Curiosity
The strongest openings give readers context that makes them curious. Context means: who (character), what (plot), when (time), where (setting), and why (stakes). As an author, you must decide what, and how much, detail to offer while leaving the reader with questions so they keep turning pages.
Curiosity can be stoked by the usual suspects: drama (meaning high stakes and struggle), tragedy, mystery, romance, lust, and love. It might also be conjured by some intriguing world-building, as in sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Beautiful prose that conjures setting combined with a seductive narrative voice can also do the trick. See for example: the opening lines of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; or just about anything by Michael Crummey.
The strange, the unusual or idiosyncratic also make good openers. George Saunders is particularly adept at this with his slightly off-kilter fictional worlds. But an idiosyncratic narrative voice can be so disruptive of the norm that it alone hooks. Thomas King’s One Good Story, That One is an excellent example as is Ian McCurdy’s short story Crossroads.
Types of Openers
Lights! Camera! Action!: this is an opening that combines an attention-grabbing first sentence that hooks the reader with a swift set up of character, setting, and stakes combined with an inciting incident that puts the plot in motion and sets the hero and the reader on their journey. The reader is immediately carried away, perhaps gulping the narrative in one sitting. Check out RF Kuang’s Yellowface as an example. Classic thrillers are very good at this too (see: The Retreat by Elisabeth de Mariaffi). So is the slower paced and lyrical, A History of Burning by Janika Oza.
Inciting Incident: A reliable place to begin is on the day when everything changes for the hero. Think about the inciting incident (ie. the thing that puts the plot in motion) and begin as close as possible to that point. Frodo Baggins is minding his own damn business in the Shire when his drunk uncle gives him the world’s most dangerous present. Cinderella is an indentured servant until an invitation arrives from the palace. Better still: Jessica Grant’s brilliant short story My Husband’s Jump.
Aphorism: This is a fun old-timey hook. Altogether now… “All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Note that in both cases, we have coherent sentences that spark curiosity. You might wonder, for example: how? and does he truly? And both Tolstoy and Austen jump right from abstract aphorism into specific domestic scenes. Anna Karenina begins with the revelation of an affair that throws a family into chaos. And in Pride & Prejudice, an eligible bachelor moves in next door to a family with five unmarried daughters. So we swiftly move from generic truism to specific drama (the day everything changed).
The subtle route: There’s a risk to a flashy beginning: hurtling headlong into cliche or artificiality. Many of the best openings are quieter, subtler, and more artful. In Téa Mutonji’s short story The Photographer’s Wife, two people meet. One is an ardent pursuer and the other is ambivalent but finally agrees to a date. The apparent power imbalance (ie. tension) and the narrator’s reluctance makes the reader wonder why and what will happen next? Just enough information to elicit questions.
In Michael Christie’s The Extra two people are so hard up financially, they rent a space without running water and must urinate into the same jugs they later use to collect drinking water. Christie’s prose is pristine, the details visceral and specific. Right away, we have a picture of characters on the edge (stakes). Naturally the reader wonders will they be okay? Or perhaps the reader stays for the quality of the writing. When done exceptionally well, prose alone can carry the narrative a long way. See: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.
A dream: I began this post with dreams. Yes, they are cliche. No, they are not verboten. There’s the cliff. Hang tight till Friday for Part II of this series when I tell you why.
