magistrate (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
magistrate) wrote2013-10-04 09:51 pm
magistrate) wrote2013-10-04 09:51 pm
First lines and general musing (sans firm conclusion or pointed instruction)
As an exercise, to try to ease my brain up out of its months-long stress-induced no-writing slump, I sat down and copied out the first sentence (or two; the first lines of If The Mountain Comes really don't work if you only take the first sentence) of all the short stories I've had published in various markets, and then grouped them by whether I (personally) thought they were engaging or not.
The lists I came up with were these, arranged roughly in what I think of as descending order of effectiveness:
Particularly Effective
- François and Papa were outside, discussing what to do if the water rose. I was in, scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand. ("If The Mountain Comes", Clarkesworld, 2012)
- When it came time to carry her father's soul down from the mountain, she had nothing to carry it in. ("Portage", Apex, 2010)
- When I was ten, I saw a man named Menley brought out to the Ocean of Starve. ("All That Touches the Air", Lightspeed, 2011)
- It was a beautiful explosion, and in a way, Jordan was lucky to have such a good seat. ("Water Rights", Edge of Infinity, 2012)
- They've made us speak Hlerig. ("Frozen Voice", Clarkesworld, 2011)
- I went a little crazy when the squid washed up on Mission Beach, and not for the reasons everyone else did. ("The Relative Densities of Seawater and Blood", Brain Harvest, 2012)
- Tell me about the streetlamps. ("Year of the Rabbit", Chizine, 2012)
- That was the year the war got so bad in Mortova that the world took notice, after twenty years of a column inch here and there on the last pages of the international section. ("In Metal, In Bone", Eclipse Online, 2013)
- Three hours after the light flared into the sky, I finally got in touch with Dad. ("God in the Sky", Asimov's, 2011)
- I woke with salt on my face, ghost trails of the night's tears. ("Of Men and Wolves", Fantasy Magazine, 2011)
- North near Los Alamos, one siren screams. ("Small Monuments", Chizine, 2008)
- High in the bluffs, with its tower and its wicker-woven hut, we watched the long north road. ("Jessamine", Reflection's Edge, 2010)
- When she came back to the shore and found her swanskin, she knew someone had been there while she was away. ("Swanskin Song", Expanded Horizons, 2012)
- My sister Andrea died in a bicycle-car collision when I was 16. ("Abandonware", Fantasy Magazine, 2010)
Another is that, wow, the effectiveness of the first lines really doesn't map to the effectiveness of the stories as a whole. (In terms of accolades, All That Touches the Air and Abandonware are the two that have made it into Years Best compilations; Water Rights I feel ended up more like a thought experiment or worldbuilding study than an actual story, and I think that In Metal, In Bone probably deserved more of a hook than it got – though maybe not, as the first line does pretty well convey the tone of the rest of the story.
A third is that I seem to misremember the first lines on a lot of my early stuff. (Small Monuments actually begins with a short poem that I'm sure 2008!me thought was a good idea, but 2013!me winces at and wishes not to acknowledge. Even worse is that the end of the story hangs on it, thoguh it has no relevance in the story itself. Really, 2008!me? Really? – and I could have sworn that Jessamine started out with the words [An old story. A man. A girl. A black tower that rose like the treetops and outlasted them all.], which its original version (a very stream-of-consciousness work) did, but which since got polished out, though now I think that would have been a prettier hook, if not a fully effective one.)
A perhaps more important observation is this:
I tend to like (meaning, find effective) hooks that use some element of contradiction or something out of place, unexpected, requiring more explanation. The Ocean of Starve. (For what reason could an ocean have that name? –and why would someone be brought out to it?) Scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand. (Blood on the walls? And sand, no sponge or rag or cleaner?) Carry her father's soul down the mountain. (In Java, if you try to use a method from a class you haven't imported, you're required to import it before you can compile without errors. That snippet lets you know that there's a whole religion and way of living that's been invoked and waiting to be brought in.) A beautiful explosion. (A contradiction in how something is described and how we expect it to be portrayed.) The only one that doesn't follow this basic formula in the "Highly Effective" category is Frozen Voice's: "They've made us speak Hlerig." Which I wrote hoping to convey a bitterness and anger, which is built upon in the rhythm of the following lines:
They've made us speak Hlerig.By contrast, there's little that's surprising in the not-so-effective ones. Little that hints at a story you can't work out on your own. Anyone can lose a sister; anyone can wake with dried tears. Even the more obviously speculative ones – the light flaring into the sky, watching the long north road, the swanskin – seem somehow generic; they either treat with common tropes (mythological retelling) or simply aren't tied into anything that makes us care.
They've made us wrestle sounds slippery as fish or burly as bears through our throats. They've made us stumble through conversations, even human-to-human, that we can hardly say. We can't pronounce our names.
(A brief digression to discuss thigns from an editor-ly point of view: one of the common reasons for rejecting stories that come in to Strange Horizons is that I never get to the point where I care about the story and what's happening. I'll fairly frequently see stories come in which are technically proficient and well-constructed, where all the mechanics are in the right place and the prose is clean, but I'm not curious as to what's going to happen, I don't feel engaged with the stakes, I don't care one way or another about what happens to the characters, etc. There are way too many solutions to this problem and I feel like all of them are nebulous and will depend mostly on the specific reader, so I'm not even going to try to give advice on that here. Hell, why should the reader care is something I struggle with enough in my own writing. But it's something I think writers should be aware of.) (And now I step back off of my editorial box, and go back to speaking from my writer-horse.)
But as I've said, the most effective opening lines don't necessarily translate into the most effective stories. And I don't think that's all that abnormal, really. There are schools of thought that you have to have a hook, and you have to grab people's attention; in my experience though, if you have an audience amenable to reading, what you have to do is not kick them out of the story and lead them further in. Starting a story with an eyepunch or a gutpunch can do a disservice to it, if its strength is in intricacy or subtlety. And it can seem aggressive, jarring, staccato, and grating if your reader has read a bunch of stories with really obvious hooks.
Really, some of the stories (of other people) that stand out in my head as favorites seem very polite and softspoken when you're first introduced to them, casually neglecting to telegraph the fact that gutpunches reside within. Consider:
- “Well now,” he said, giving me a sad smile. “What on earth are we going to do with you?” (One Little Room an Everywhere, K.J. Parker)
- Morning Edition, Akhet, Thuthi 19, 4511 The ceremony started at exactly six o'clock this morning when the clerics of Anpu, Iset, Seker, and Nebet-het stood at the four corners to create the sanctified square. ("Until Forgiveness Comes", K. Tempest Bradford)
- The angel of the LORD cometh upon you in the shower at the worst possible moment: one hand placed upon thy right buttock and the other bearing soap, radio blaring, humming a heathen song of sin. ("The Parable of the Shower", Leah Bobet)
- The Library of Babel is one of those extrusions of pure logic into our universe that you get sometimes, a library of infinite size containing all possible books. ("Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel", Shaenon K. Garrity)
- Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. ("God's War", Kameron Hurley – not a short story, but a fantastic novel, and look at that hook. The second sentence, and paragraph, starts with "Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina[...]", which just hooks in more.)
- Then came that Thursday in February when I stepped into my psychiatrist's office and was presented with a goat. ("I Have Placed my Sickness Upon You", Karin Tidbeck)
I Have Placed My Sickness Upon You is a bit of an exception to the general pattern implied above – it's a story with an at-first-flush bizarre conceit which twines seamlessly into a soft look at clinical depression and a surprisingly hard resolution. But its beginning definitely has that "Hey! Look at me! Do I have your attention now?" quality: of all the ways this information could have been presented, it's hard and bald and unexplained.
I think what I'm coming around to, via this roundabout as-I-type musing, is that first lines are a little like styles of narration: they're tools, and you can use different tools for different jobs. In the same way that careful attention to language can create a meaningful second layer on top of some stories and obscure others – some stories work well with windowpane narration, whose only purpose is to let you see into the story, not to ornament them – first lines can call attention to themselves or just slide you on into the story. The beginning of God's War hits you right upfront that Nyx is a woman for whom the bounds of what is possible or permissible (or perhaps required) are altered. You almost have to stop and blink before reading forward. Whereas the introduction to One Little Room an Everywhere doesn't even seem to stand on its own; it's just there to hand you off to the next sentence, which hands you off to the third, and on in.
In any case, it's something I don't think I'd really sat down to examine in any depth before, so now I can say I've done that. And hopefully have a better sense of how this particular mechanic works in the stories I write in the future.
no subject
But yeah, I think this is an interesting analysis and it's certainly given me some food for thought! I agree with you about the surprising/mysterious nature of really effective hooks; you want to read on to find out what the explanation could possibly be for such an odd, seemingly contradictory statement. The best way to hook me is with a question of some kind.
At the same time, I think reading this post also made me think about how I look for different things from short stories and novels, and the hook is, I guess, part of that, or at least a good signaling mechanism for indicating what's in the box. In particular, the Bobet and Garrity openings are ones that I remember grabbing me instantly and the stories then held me to the end because they were just so fucking weird. But I'm not sure if either one could have held my attention for the length of a novel, because it's too weird, too much bizarreness hitting me from all sides. Some people might enjoy that rapid pace of shifting mental gymnastics kept up for an entire novel -- there are certainly novels out there that are like that -- but I can think of very few that worked for me.
Whereas, looking at the openings of some of my favorite novels, they're often mysterious or intriguing, but in a much quieter way. Or they're even more subtle than that; I just picked Watership Down off the shelf to flip through the first pages, and it opens with an extended evening scene in a pastoral meadow (with BLOOD AND VIOLENCE later, but the first few pages are just a slow, lyrical description of a quiet English countryside). I don't know if I would've stuck with it in short story form, but for a novel it works fine. Roots is next to it on the shelf and it's even more mellow; it starts with the main character being born and then proceeds from there.
I know I'm bad at hooks and I'm trying to get better. Overall, I think I'm weak on craft and need to improve. But I also think part of the problem is that I'm a natural long-form writer rather than a short-form writer, and it's interesting to think about how that might affect my overall pacing and style, even when I'm trying to work in a shorter medium. (For me, the God's War lines you quoted would fascinate me in a short story but as a novel opening, it doesn't really call to me all that much; not to say that I might not enjoy the novel -- it's on my too-read list! -- but for me as a reader, this feels like a more catchy short-story opening than something to hook me into a novel. It's too much information packed into too short a space. I like a novel to unfold and absorb me gradually.)
... btw, I really appreciated the heads-up about the Strange Horizons gig but I never did do anything with it. I just didn't feel that I would be able to put in the time (and as busy as I am right now with school, I think it was a good choice). But thank you!
no subject
Hah, that's the great thing about different readers (and why so many different markets can all flourish in more or less the same space) – what's effective and what isn't varies a lot from person to person. (Also, thank you!)
I have an amusing story about Watership Down, in that I still remember its first sentence – The primroses were over – just because I tried to read it at a fairly young age and found the first sentence so stupefyingly boring that I could not get past it. (I was not the kind of kid that took a lot of interest in pastoral anything. Somehow, the first sentence just telegraphed to me that I would not be interested in the story contained within.)
And then, of course, when I finally sat down and read past it, and ended up adoring the book as a whole.
But yeah; in general, I think that novels are more likely to be able to take their time with things, let everything spool out and a more leisurely pace. I hadn't really planned on looking closely at novel openings, but – why not? I grabbed a random selection of novels I'm fond of off my shelves. Let's see what their spread looks like, arranged in no particular order.
Okay. So, from my small sample size and extremely unscientific methodology, it seems like in novels there's a lot more tendency to sit you down and set the scene. A lot of these don't do much to signal what specifics you might be dealing with, though some (esp. The Kite Runner) give you a sense of the sort of story: The Kite Runner is obviously angled more memoir; The Lions of Al-Rassan is, yes, going to be an extremely political fantasy with lots of characters and places and a map and list of characters in the front you can look things up in. (*grin*)
(It's one of the things I also see a lot in the submissions pile: people who aren't sure how to pace for a short story. One of the frequent complaints I have goes something along the lines of "This story is 5000 words long, I'm 2000 words in, and plot has not started happening yet." Unless the setup is intriguing and engaging in its own right – and there are some stories where, yeah, the majority of the beginning is just a slowly-deepening setup for the punch of the end – you can't really afford to spend more than, say, a fifth* of your story without hitting the point.)
*(First number that felt right as an upper bound. I have not actually gone and collected wordcounts or done any sort of study. Not to be taken as proscriptive.)
In novels, you can (generally) take some time (and it's often considered good form to give readers a chapter or something to get situated) before throwing things into motion. (Though, as with everything, within proportional reason – I remember becoming immensely frustrated with Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan because I had read something like a hundred pages and he was still describing the castle in painstaking, room-by-room detail.)
I think one of the reasons the God's War opening works in the context of the book is that it's an extremely good telegraph of what you're going to get. There's a lot of blood and violence and a lot of people taking this as matter-of-fact in the world that they live in. There's a lot of how people relate to their bodies which is going to seem really strange and counterintuitive to the readers. And Hurley doesn't go after it with a lot of sentiment; the environment in the books is dry and harsh, and the cultures reflect that, and the characters reflect that, and the writing reflects it all.
I think you're right about Babel and Shower; it's hard to see that sort of twisty-turniness working over something much longer than those. I think the longest works that do kinda follow that clever-twists-and-turns format that I can think of off the top of my head are Justine Larbalestier's Liar (which I know you didn't like :P . I kept meaning to reply to your post on that, but that was in the middle of my life going haywire, so I never managed it; still, I think a lot of the reasons it didn't work for you are the reasons I really hooked into it, except that I read from a perspective that the speculative story was the underlying truth, and I have to wonder if that perspective shift is the key to it working or if it's just individual taste) and Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners. Those start off like this:
Of them, I think Magic for Beginners is more of the subtle variety and Liar goes for more of the traditional hook, but they both lead with a question.
no subject
One of the things that I always recommend to people wanting to get better at writing short stories is the study a lot of poetry. Because damn, but poets understand economy of language. I think that in some ways it's even better than studying short stories, because it really yanks your attention down to how to tell a story in a hypercomressed space.
(...this seems like a perfect excuse for shameless poem quoting and linking! Let's look at some first sentences in poems I really enjoy! Looking specifically at ones which seem to tell a story.)
an inch and a half each year.
– ("Facts About the Moon", Dorianne Laux)
someone has to clean up.
– ("The End and the Beginning", Wisława Szymborska)
that on one summer morning here, the ocean
pounded in on tumbledown breakers,
a south wind, bustling along the shore,
whipped the froth into little rainbows,
and a reckless gull swept down the beach
as if to fly were everything it needed.
– (Last-Minute Message For a Time Capsule)
– ("Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal ", Naomi Shihab Nye)
– ("After the Movie", Marie Howe)
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
– ("Ginsberg", Julia Vinograd)
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don't remember.
– ("The Shout", Simon Armitage)
...that's probably enough. Seems like a good mix of scene-setting and question-raising, though; Time Capsule's "I have to tell you this" adds an urgency to what would otherwise be a pastoral scene; "The moon is backing away from us" is an odd little fact whose relevance isn't obvious; Airport Terminal starts with an imperative; "the boy whose name and face I don't remember" jars that particular opening out of its straightforward, expected form; "After every war someone has to clean up" starts you off in a pretty generic, we've-heard-this-one-before setting (war) and then moves it crisply into a part that we don't see all the time. There's not a lot of space wasted in any of them.
[... btw, I really appreciated the heads-up about the Strange Horizons gig but I never did do anything with it. I just didn't feel that I would be able to put in the time (and as busy as I am right now with school, I think it was a good choice). But thank you!]
No problem! If you ever do think you'd have the time, we're almost always open to having more first readers, so even if there's not something listed you can ping me and I can check with the other editors. (Often, we take down the listing because we don't want competing signals with something like our ongoing fund drive, or we don't have the time to deal with the rush of an open listing. But really, we can almost always use more hands on deck.)