Let Us Begin

When you open a book you've never read before, when did you first go “Hmm! How interesting!” I (Donis) know you've heard many times how important the opening few sentences of a novel are, and, really, that can hardly be overstated.

 If you’re Steven King, people are going to cut you a lot of slack about the beginning of your novel, but if nobody every heard of you, you need to create the most interesting beginning you can.  Grab ‘em right away. In a way, your story is starting in the middle. A lot has happened before we get there. Suck them in with a good first page.

When I open a novel to the first page, I always notice how quickly the author sets the stage, the first moment the author gave the reader a clue about the time period, the setting, the problem, the characters. I've learned a lot about good beginnings from my favorite authors. Below are some openings I admired (and one I used myself), and I ask you, Dear Reader - Would you read this book?

When I found my husband at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to resuscitate him before I ever considered disposing of the body. – Tanya Dubois, The Passenger.

The letter from Tally came on the day Bert Checkov died. – Dick Francis, Forfeit

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. – Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

When the girl came rushing up the steps, I thought she was wearing far too many clothes.– Lindsey Davis, Silver Pigs

Ginny Scoot was standing on a third-floor ledge, threatening to jump, and it was more or less my fault. – Janet Evanovich, Tricky Twenty-Two

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening when I poked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. – Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

Coming back from the dead isn’t as easy as they make it seem in the movies. – Christa Faust, Money Shot

The last camel collapsed at noon.

It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little. – Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca.

The traveler stood at the head of the alley and watched the ruckus for a long time, trying to decide whether or not to get involved. He thought not. He had just been passing by on his way from the hotel to the Muskogee train station when he heard the commotion and stopped to take a look. He wished he hadn’t.–  Donis Casey, All Men Fear Me

And an oldie but goody:

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high, flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?” —Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Is there an opening line/paragraph that knocked you out, Dear Reader? All we authors who have to start somewhere would like to know.

Staring at the mountain

 Today is the final day of August, and although summer officially ends on September 22, in reality, for most of us it ends on Labour Day. As the lazy, hazy days of summer draw toward a close, I can feel society collectively girding its loins and gearing up to face the renewed demands of work. Stores are full of families in search of back to school supplies and clothes, ads seem to be about nothing else, and adults are sizing up their fall wardrobes to see what is still presentable (and still fits). Vacations are coming to an end.

I have not had a regular week-day job – one that I had to set the alarm, drag myself out of bed and fight through traffic for – in over ten years. Since then, I've written about twelve books and faced deadlines, but the weeks and months, even the days of the week and hours of the day, blurred. We writers march to our own timelines and whether it's Sunday at 10 p.m. or Monday at 9 a.m. matters not a whit.

But I spent almost all of my life on a regular working-stiff schedule, with the last twenty-five years of it in a school system for which Labour Day was truly the beginning of a new work year. That pattern of marking Labour Day as the end of relaxed summer and the gearing up for serious work is deeply engrained, and even after ten years, it still feels like a transitional moment. As it approaches, I look ahead to what my fall writing plans are. Being between writing projects, I have had a very lazy summer of reading and visiting with family and friends. Now I feel the pressure to get moving and get productive again. I'm not the kind of person to stay idle and I'm not ready for the rocking chair on the porch. 

Time for a new writing project.

If Douglas is nearing the summit of the proverbial "first draft" mountain, I am standing some distance from the base, gazing at it in the distance and wondering where the entry path is. Indeed, if there even is an entry path.

Here's my mountain, remote and obscure.

Often I start my hunt for the entrance by researching the topic or setting. I order numerous books and settle down to a couple of months of background reading. I do have a germ of an idea for a story I'd like to tell and I suspect I'll have a lot of reading to prepare for it. Exploring new topics and gaining new insights that spark my imagination are always exciting parts of the writing process for me. 

So I'll get on to the various book sites (used and new) and order some titles. Then immediately after Labour Day, I'll be ready to hit the ground, if not running, at least with a decent level of drive and excitement. 

The Ice Ages

Time passes so quickly that it alarms me sometimes. How did I get anything done at all in my former life when I worked for other people? The truth is that I didn’t, or at least I was only able to do whatever was absolutely necessary to live.

Now my work is writing, and work at it I do, and yet it still feels to me that I’m always short of time. Days bleed into one another, and weeks, and months, and a year passes without my quite being aware of how it happened. It seems that I’m constantly busy, and yet I feel like I make little progress.

Yet when I remember the monumental events in my past that changed my life forever, or set me on a new path, I realize that most of them happened quickly, sometimes in an instant. I think of that when I’m frustrated, when it comes to me that I have less and less time in front of me to fool around with and wonder if it’s just going to be like this for the rest of my life. In the words of that immortal philosopher, Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

I’m normally not much bothered by things, and I think I have a naturally sunny disposition. But every life goes through periods that must be endured, and the past few years have been my personal Ice Age. My husband’s health problems have been no secret. We have endured and he keeps coming through, and I’ve been able to return to my own pursuits. But it seems that something has changed. I go through the days with a sense of unreality. I want to hold myself at a distance. My mind wanders. I’ve frozen over.

Everyone gets to go through these periods, if they live long enough, and this is not my first rodeo, as we say in Oklahoma. It’s the universal life experience, to lose loved ones, to go through extended times of stress and fear. In the past, no matter how unendurable a situation seemed at the time, I lived through it whether I felt like it or not, and the fog eventually lifted. I expect that will happen again. You just have to hunker down and wait for spring.

With that in mind, I’ve finally begun working on the tenth Alafair Tucker novel, though at this point the manuscript consists of several pages that meander about like the mighty Ganges. But I keep plugging along. I need a few more good weeks of writing to make significant progress, yet next month is shaping up to be very busy with the launch of book nine, The Return of the Raven Mocker. So I’m working hard to get as much done as I can before things get crazy. It’s interesting to see how a new book shapes up. No matter what you plan, things show up in your writing that never occurred to you when you started out. Funny. You dig deep for your characters, and bring up a lot of stuff that was way down inside yourself.