Whatever skill produces great openings, I don’t think I come by it naturally. I spent half of my MFA program writing ornate gilded frames to begin my workshop submissions, all in service of establishing a reason for why I was writing what I was writing besides just plain affinity for the books and authors I was focusing on; my drafts usually improved once I cut all that and just started at the first paragraph after all that table-setting; the critiques I got about “why the writer is writing about this” never changed anyway. Probably most important in that to-the-point development was reading the essays of the art critic John Berger, who taught me plenty about art but more importantly how to get to the point. No wasted words for Berger; he almost always started with a strong, succinct idea off the bat and then spent the rest of the essay proving it. “The art museum curators of the world (with perhaps three or four exceptions) are simply not with us.” begins “The Historical Function of the Museum”; “The great revelations all occur before the age of twenty-five.” begins a section on Vermeer in “The Painter in His Studio.” Get in, get out, no mucking about: that’s Berger, and his is an example I should follow more, rather than, well, the 200 preceding words. Like I said, I’ve always been more of a wend-my-way till I get there kind of guy.
The opening lines of a novel are one of those things that shouldn’t matter at all but, like cover art, can mean the world. Plenty of good and even great novels begin with a standard setting of the table before ramping up, and plenty of just fine novels start with a bang before withering out, but the great starts to great book stick out as sort of immediate announcements of quality. The first lines of a book have to establish a voice and create a world all at once; it’s as close as the author gets to God: in the beginning, there was nothing, and then there was book. You need the confidence to not fall into exposition, to not try to explain everything all at once, to not sweatily give the elevator pitch to your novel right as you introduce yourself. The electric quality of an opening is why the really great ones are passed around among friends and posted online so frequently; there’s something quite miraculous about someone taking a big swing and so thoroughly connecting right from the outset. In an interview with The Ringer, both Hanif Abdurraqib and the interviewer, Lex Pryor, claimed that the opening line of Toni Morrison’s Jazz was their favorite sentence ever written. (“Sth, I know that woman,” for your reference; such a triumph of voice, a sound we all know put down into a word - Sth.) While I have many favorite openers – Charles Portis’s Dog of the South (“My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.”), the short story “Taking Care” by Joy Williams (“Jones, the preacher, has been in love all his life.”), “Money…? in a voice that rustled.” from Gaddis’s J R, and those two shots across the bow of the American novel: “Call me Ishmael” and “A screaming comes across the sky” – the one I think about the most is the opening paragraph of Denis Johnson’s novel Angels:
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