Hi Everyone:
I have always loved movies. Even as a little kid growing up
on the East side of Cleveland, I looked forward to going to the Saturday
matinee. In those days, theaters used to entice the audience with a double
feature that included at least one action film, News of the Day, Previews of
the Coming Attractions, a Travel-log, numerous cartoons, and a cliff-hanging
Serial. Along with my two older sisters, I went every Saturday. My sisters
liked the romance films while I favored the action movie, but none of us wanted
to miss the Serial. We just had to find out how the hero survived last week’s
big finish.
As they used to say at the movies, “Time Marches On.” Some
things have changed, but not my love of movies. I still favor action films and
even they have changed. In the past, the filmmakers first focused on the main
characters, allowing viewers to identify with them and their surroundings. Do
you remember “On the Waterfront?” The big fight scene where Marlon Brando
defies the mob boss didn’t take place until the movie was about over. Now films
open with an explosion and after fifteen minutes of non-stop action, the
picture fades into back-story letting you find out how all this came about. It
seems that the movie moguls have learned that they only have a few minutes to
grab the public’s attention.
The same is true of many readers.
Before television, and even before the picture show, authors like Sir Walter
Scott introduced their characters and setting before engulfing the reader with
the novel’s action. I believe Somerset
Maugham said, ‘There are rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what
they are.’
Modern authors tend to begin their
story where the action takes place. They recognize that they have about three pages,
at best, to capture their reader’s interest.
Sol Stein in his excellent book, Stein
on Writing, listed three goals of the opening paragraph:
1. To
excite the reader’s curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship.
2. To
introduce a setting.
3. To
lend resonance to the story.
Do
you recall reading The Tale of Two Cities
by Dickens? You can probably recite the way his opening lines introduced
the setting:
“It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was
the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Mark
Twain was adroit at capturing the reader’s curiosity. Here are the opening
lines from Roughing It : “My brother
had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory—an office of such majesty
that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer,
Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor’s absence.
A salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year, and the title of “Mr. Secretary,”
gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young
and ignorant, and I envied my brother. . .”
See
how Leo Tolstoy gives resonance to the story, and even without mentioning Anna Karenina, pulls us into his setting:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.
Everything
was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the
husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a
governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could
not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now
lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the
members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it.”
Mario
Puzo introduces readers to a character and arouses curiosity with these opening
lines from The Fourth K:
“Oliver
Oliphant was one hundred years old and his mind was as clear as a bell.
Unfortunately for him.
It
was a mind so clear, yet so subtle, that while breaking a great many moral
laws, it had washed his conscience clean. A mind so cunning that Oliver
Oliphant had never fallen into the almost inevitable traps of everyday life: he
had never married, never run for political office and never had a friend he
trusted absolutely.”
If
that didn’t grab you how about this from Mitch Albom’s book, Tuesdays with Morrie:
“The
last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his house, by a
window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink
leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was
The Meaning of Life. It was taught from experience.”
Authors
try to entice the reader to invest time in taking a journey. The writer who becomes
so enamored of his prose that he waits until the second or third chapter to inject
conflict, or a goal, risks losing his readers before they get to page three.
Here
are the opening lines from my novel, Path
to a Pardon, that revolves around stolen diamonds:
“In
the early hours of a cool mid-October morning, while Miami slumbered under dark
skies, they drove the route to the diamond exchange for the last time. The
downtown streets emitted the quiet sounds of a hospital zone.
Gus
checked his watch as they circled the block and then turned into the little
alley behind the building on Flagler Street.”
My detective novel, Palm Beach Style, begins with this dialogue:
“I
tell you, Frankie, it ain’t right. It shouldn’t be no even split. I know this
thing was Pike’s idea and them other two are gonna help guard the guy, but
where are they? We’re out here making the damn snatch for a lousy twenty
percent of the take. Right?”
