Thing Feigned or Imagined by Fred Stenson

Author:Fred Stenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Banff Centre Press
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Story Beginnings

HOOKING, GUIDING,

AND INFORMING

How should a short story begin? Some blunt and all-encompassing things have been said on this subject. Given the almost limitless capacity of writers to begin stories in new and effective ways, nothing so final will be said here.

Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction definition, quoted in Chapter 3, implies that if you blow your first line or paragraph, all is lost. It is true that no story can afford to begin ineffectively, but the insistence of some that the story always begin with impact! has led to excess.

Blood suddenly oozed under the door.

She looked up and the elevator streaked down the shaft toward her.

It may not be wrong to try hard to rivet attention at the outset, but a study of how skilful writers begin short stories yields the truth that nothing needs to explode, no one needs to die, in sentence one.

Though the emphasis of this chapter will be on the short story, much of what I write here applies equally to the novel. The need to hook a reader off the top may seem to be a short-story thing rather than a novel thing, but let’s not be too quick to assume. If people buy a magazine with a short story in it, they’ll probably read the story because they own the magazine, whether it has a whiz-bang beginning or not. If as various studies suggest, readers go into a bookstore most often not knowing what they want to buy, then maybe the first page of a novel needs a hook as much or more than a short story does. Maybe it needs that hook as much as it needs a fancy cover and a provocative title.

For purposes of comparison, I’ve reread the first lines of many favourite novels, and I see no important differences compared to short-story beginnings. The effort to hook readers, the planting of an important question, the introduction of characters, are all present.

Let’s consider what a reader is doing as a short story or novel begins. The idea that a story must begin with a bang is based on the idea that a reader (or editor, perhaps more to the point) is approaching a story or novel with enormous scepticism and dozens of other pressing things to do. That much may be true, but this big-bang opening theory also implies that readers aren’t subtle or wide-ranging in terms of what will grab their attention. A short-story beginning should be interesting, but who can define what that means? Startling, amusing, intriguing, stylish—soothing even? The beginning must pose a question of sufficient interest that readers read on in search of an answer. Many writers do begin a story with the assumption of dedicated readers who won’t stop dead just because the first sentence hasn’t made them sweat with anxiety. Others begin with the assumption that readers take a minute or so to get their interest engaged. Those writers don’t pack the first sentences with facts readers must grasp to understand the story.

My concern with fictional beginnings is that readers, at the outset of a story, are trying to orientate themselves.

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