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Underground > Creation >

Starting a fiction with "(Name) (performed action)"

All Acting Regiment

10:08 / 21.05.05

Nathan slammed the car into first gear.

I don't like this as a start to a fiction; this convention- I don't think it works. Does anyone else here know what I mean? It's lazy, it really is- if they expanded it a bit, you know Nathan Green, on the run from the cops... then maybe, but I still find it boring.

Am I being unreasonable?

17:02 / 21.05.05

I love it. I use it all the time. I find it sucks the reader directly into the action and makes them want to read on. On a slightly related note, if I read "Nathan, on the run from the cops..." as an opening sentance, I'd probably flip right past the story right away because it's showing not telling, giving away too much too soon - something characteristic of the writing of a 13 year old.

20:49 / 21.05.05

On the one hand, "Name verbed" lets the reader know what's happening and whose point of view they're in.

But it gets formulaic and boring if you do it all the time, no?

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

18:52 / 22.05.05

My favorite openings to novels are from the "Destroyer" action novel series. They are amaziongly formula driven, but the work to draw me in as a reader...

"His name was Remo Williams and he was (either action or emotion)"

The first line of a novel is always a hard one, and it's rare I read a REALLY memorable one.

19:48 / 22.05.05

This seemed relevant to your question. (I couldn't find a link to this, so I'm just going to type it. I hope no one minds)
The Sunday Times Magazine.
Listomania
Ten Beginnings to classic novels,

"For a long time I used to go to bed early." Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust.

"Lolita, light of my life fire of my loins". Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish". The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway.

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy.

"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." The Outsider, Albert Camus.

"Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without presents", grumbled Jo, lying on the rug." Little Women, Louise May Alcott.

"It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." 1984, George Orwell.

"Call me Ishmael." Moby-Dick, Herman Melville.

Two of my own favourites include;

"Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair" A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick.

"CENTRAL INTAKE HOSPITAL

Admittance Sheet Friday, August 15th, 1969

Name... Unknown
Sex... Male
Age... Unknown
Addres..Unknown
General Remarks

... At midnight the police found Patient wandering on the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge."

Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Doris Lessing.

Also the first line from "To a Lighthouse" Virgina Woolf.

From that I can take that people can immediately be drawn into the action without resorting to the discussed format. It's the arresting, interesting and uncommon that makes for a good first line. IMO descriptive passages work quite well on an introductory apparatus as do dialogues.

However if said format helps you when beginning a story use it. The start can always be re-worked if it needs it!

20:31 / 22.05.05

dialogue is always a great way to start... one of my favorite openings is from Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro:

"The marvelous thing is that it's painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts."
"Is it really?"
"Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you."
"Don't! Please don't."

00:40 / 23.05.05

j. m. coetzee's 'the life and times of michael k' (which i just finished this morning) starts:

'The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip.'

this line works extremely well in the context of a work whose title is eponymous with the protagonist. it is actually an acutely brilliant account of a life - he is a fabulous writer and a worthy nobel recipient.

(the camus opener above is always my personal fave)

i am about to embark on a workshop for novelists with a local writer of some note and are always troubled by the opening line of anything i write. i will ask how he copes and mebbe report back here...

Whisky Priestess

22:20 / 25.05.05

Apparently over 50% of first novels start with the main character waking up.

I think if you get beyond that it's a good start.

Tryphena Absent

00:18 / 26.05.05

I think it really depends on the type of thing you're writing. If you want to leave an impression with the first sentence that is a little bit askew, if you're engaging in a weird writing style then it's not the way to begin. If you want to pin down the mundanity of characters in an unusual situation then there isn't another way to start that will work as well.

13:56 / 24.11.05

i am about to embark on a workshop for novelists with a local writer of some note and are always troubled by the opening line of anything i write. i will ask how he copes and mebbe report back here...

Hey astrojax, any chance on an update on this?

14:21 / 24.11.05

Heh. My second novel starts with someone waking up. What are the stats for that, WP?

23:09 / 24.11.05

'*Don,* his nostrils flaring in the white hot heat of the red top powerhouse newsroom that he knew, for a fact, would soon be his for the taking, as if it were a drunken doe-eyed intern that was waiting for him, spread-eagled, in the editor's chair (he'd do her first, he surmised, and then he'd get to the real goods, oh yes, he would - this time around, there would be no mistakes, no quarter given, and no distractions at all, in the stationary cupboard at this year's Christmas party, all that was behind him now... though how easily, he reflected, had it been to escape the charges, when you thought about it...) hit the magic button at the edge of the screen, and then in less than the time it takes to tell, dear reader, shamelessly whored out his ouevre all over the interweb, yet again...

He then had a strange dream.

And then he woke up... Christ, what had he been doing? He was there yes, in the editor's chair, the one he'd always coveted, but what was he doing with his 'John Thomas' out? And why was that digicam still focused on it, and still whirring away like a baleful red eye? And why was he still logged on to that particular website, that one, he knew, to which his... addiction (was that too strong a word? He didn't know, really,) was potentially, arguably, affecting his career in a negative way?

Don was stumped.

'Bollocks,' he thought 'Bollocks to all of them.'

He reached over to the drawer in his (soon-to-be-history, he reminded himself,) editor's desk, and then, just for a laugh, he decided to check out the latest developments on the aforementioned website...

After that, Don would always maintain that his hair had turned white because of an incident to do with his son, and a... snake ('it was a bloody boa constrictor,') in the local zoo on a family outing, but nevertheless, and notoriously, anyone who expressed an interest after that in the works of Grant Morrison, or Dr Who, or teh Magick was, in an interview with Don, on a hiding to nothing.

How he would wish, in years to come, that discretion had in fact proved the better part of valour, when it had come to his decision to post 'Little Don's' image on Barbelith that time...'

02:30 / 25.11.05

Haha. Penis jokes. Now that's the way to start a novel.

Personally, I open with dialogue, the more oblique, the better. It creates confusion in the reader, and makes them wanna go further.

06:21 / 25.11.05

Alex: Unless the cupboard is generally prone to moving around, it should probably be a stationery cupboard.

Ah, always good to get that sort of thing out of my system before breakfast.

18:51 / 25.11.05

the one i instantly remembered when i read the topic was this:

"umber whunnnn yerrrnnn umber whunnnn fayunnnn
These sounds: even in the haze."

first line of stephen king's misery

20:16 / 27.11.05

loomis, he was singularly unhelpful, suffering the same anxiety the rest of us do!

but it is like any editing process, keep in what works, where it works, and discard the rest (more or less)... and so phrases in the opening paras can suggest themselves as opening lines. i'll push him on this next we meet and try to squeeze more from him.

the opening lines of my novel, with its working title of 'reality and other illusions' - now about 22k words written! - are a poem, as a prelude (we see the protagonist write this in the first chapter, but not right away), then, like sax, a person wakes from something. i oughta change it now; bloody bloody..!

chapter 1

In this hall were a few randomly scattered doors, each with a gold key in its lock. There were no numbers on any door, just motes of dust suspended in light that pierced this still air. Somewhere, a telephone rang. Like old movies, bri-i-ing, bri-i-ing. Then again, and again, until it rang off. Just silent dust once again and her hushed breath. A step forwards, the worn Persian runner scrolling slowly red and gold under foot with its tatters and loose threads showing oak through in some patches outside a door here, or there. A door, each with a key.

00:52 / 28.11.05

Thanks to those who posted all those great ones! An inspiration. I wish I could write like that. One of my favorites as a contribution:

(Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven, 1993)
Women on their own run in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts which have collected above her in the dark.

[Minor note on Persian rug in the comment above: if it's old and worn, the gold will have gone to some muddy color, from dirt if nothing else. "Red" also suggests a bright color that doesn't fit the general idea.]