Plato said, “The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
Kimberly Yuhl suggests you have eight words to capture your reader’s attention.
Rob Weatherhead states in the article, Say it Quick, Say it Well (please excuse the grammar), that the attention span of a modern internet consumer is short. “Studies have shown that 32% of consumers will start abandoning slow sites between one and five seconds.”
Marcia Hoeck, in her article, How to Capture Your Reader’s Attention, writes: “You only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention, so don’t take chances with clever, cute, or insider language or visuals, which are often lost on people.”
Whether or not these statistics apply specifically to fiction writing is immaterial. They apply to today’s readers. Knowing these facts should motivate us to put extra effort into creating captivating openings for our stories.
I find that examples aid my understanding, so let’s take a look at some classic examples of beguiling beginnings:
* (my favorite) “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” This from C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
* “On November the 21st, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went…” The Private Patient, by P.D. James.
* “When the coppers talk about Marsha Morgan, they start with her death—how she fell off the Chesapeake Belle and drowned in the Miles River.” From Ron and Janet Benrey’s Little White Lies.
* Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runnerbegins this way: “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
* Caroline Way’s Confessions from a Farmer’s Wife: “I am the last one. Of those whose lives I will speak of here, I alone remain.”
* Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: “It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door.”
What do these examples have in common?
– they are concise
– they raise questions for which we want answers
– they create a mood
– they suggest the kind of story that’s coming (plot driven /character driven)
– they draw us into the story
How can we create a similar effect?
– we must decide what we want to convey; what is the most important aspect of the story?
– we must ask the right questions and know the answers, or at least where to find them
– we must decide what the mood of our story will be
– we must know the style of story we are writing
– we must revise and polish until the beginning is irresistible
Having said all this, remember that you can tweak your beginning many times, especially after the ending has been written. After all, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from” T.S. Eliot.
Janice L. Dick, an author from the Canadian prairies, has been writing intentionally since 1989 and is the author of a trilogy of historical fiction and The Other Side of the River.