Stein on Writing (4 page)

The end of the second sentence is the first omen of what proves to be an exceptionally suspenseful book. Let’s see how the first paragraph continues:

When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind her once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.

That first long paragraph introduces the two main characters, the narrator and his victim. Note the amount of concrete detail. I will reproduce that paragraph, highlighting the ominous phrases.

When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annex. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men,
which of course I didn’t like.
When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening
I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with
M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once,
before she came to be my guest here,
did I have the privilege to see her with it loose and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.

As readers, what do we take away from that first paragraph?

• The narrator didn’t like “M” seeing other young men, though she didn’t even know him!
  
• He kept an “observations diary.” He found out her name.
  
• Once he stood right behind her. She didn’t notice him, but he was studying her hair as if he were preparing to become her lover.
  
• And “she came to be my guest”? What she becomes is his prisoner!
  

An even more sly craftsman is Vladimir Nabokov. Here’s the beginning of his most famous novel:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The second paragraph continues:

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

That’s ostensibly the first paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita,
which created a sensation when it was published in 1955. “Ostensibly” because we find there’s a Foreword in front of the novel signed by one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Nabokov liked to have fun with his audience, and so in front of the book proper, he planted a mock Foreword supposedly written by a scholar. That Foreword is as intriguing as the beginning of the actual book. It describes the book as a confession, tells us the book’s author died in prison, uses concrete specifics—a diagnosis, a date, a lawyer’s name—and lets drop that the writer of the foreword was himself awarded a prize for a modest work in which “certain morbid states and perversions” were discussed. We might say that Nabokov began
Lolita
twice, and both beginnings, in different ways, were designed to excite the interest of the reader.

The opening paragraphs of
Lolita
proper—the announcing of the sounds of her name and the revelation that the protagonist is having an affair with a schoolgirl—pulls the reader in two ways: Scandalous subject matter and the immediate sense that here is a writer who plays with language artfully.

I thought it might be useful to follow a writer’s thoughts as he developed a first paragraph. I am not psychic. The experience I tapped is my own. The lawyer George Thomassy appeared in my novels
The Magician, The Childkeeper,
and
Other People.
When it came time for him to appear again in
The Touch of Treason,
I wanted to start with Thomassy looking over a courtroom where he was to try a major case. My objectives for that beginning were the three that I suggested earlier:

• To lend resonance to the story.
  
• To convey Thomassy’s personality to new readers and reintroduce him to those who’d encountered him before.
  
• To establish a courtroom setting.
  

In the end you died. There could be a courtroom like this, Thomassy thought; all the good wood bleached white, the judge deaf to objections because He owned the place. The law was His, the advocacy system finished.

If that’s what it was going to be like, George Thomassy wanted to live forever, because here on earth, God willing or not, you could fight back.

The courtroom Thomassy is viewing is in his mind. He is imagining the “courtroom” of judgment day. The reader knows the judge is He, and He “owned the place. The law was His.” It is apparent that Thomassy resents the authority of judges. Thomassy wants an arena where he can fight back. His most characteristic trait is to try to win under every circumstance, yet to continue to do so would be impossible; he would have to live forever.

That’s a lot to cram into a few lines. I hoped the essence of my intent would come across, and that the reader, at minimum, would be anticipating the courtroom drama to come.

What can a newcomer do in a first paragraph? A lot. The following is the first paragraph of a novel by a student in my advanced fiction seminar who is writing about a painter:

Shoshana stormed through the silent apartment. Mason, you son of a bitch! Where are you? Instinct told her: Mason had fled. You gutless coward, she raged. Returning to her studio, Shoshana stabbed the brush she carried into ajar of turpentine. Just try to get in one hour’s ego-affirming work of one’s own. No way!

The writer, Anne Mudgett, is using action to characterize. She is also setting up conflict between the narrator and Mason, and involving the reader in Shoshana’s emotional state.

We saw how James T. Farrell used surprise. In the example that follows, surprise is used by a student, Steve Talsky, whose work is yet to be published:

I am the way, the answer and the light, through me all things are possible.

He had written this once as a joke on the headboard of his bed.

The reader gets an impression of a character who is unusual and about
whom one wants to know more. Not least, one has the sense that this author’s work has resonance.

The value of a well-written opening is that it makes the reader ready to give himself to the writer’s imagined people for the duration.

It should be clear by now that the unusual is a factor in arousing the reader’s interest. And so is action and conflict. So many writers fight an uphill battle trying to interest their readers in matters that have no inherent conflict. The worst possible way to start a story is with something like “They were a wonderful couple. He loved her and she loved him. They never argued.”

The result is instant boredom. Boredom is the greatest enemy of both reader and writer. Do we gaze with wonder at the nice, average, normal-looking people we pass in the street? Our attention is arrested by the seven-footer and the midget, the oldster with the mechanical waddle, the child who bounces as she walks. Recall how people react to the sound of metal crunching metal, announcing an accident. They hasten to see what happened. Highways get choked when drivers slow down to gawk at the remains of an collision. To the student of literature it should come as no surprise that news programs concentrate on bad news first, on events filled with conflict.

Beginning a book with an intriguing opening is the easy way to capture the reader. There are, however, more leisurely ways to seduce the reader, through omens.

You have heard people say, “I’ve got a feeling something is going to happen.” How is that done? In
The Magician,
the opening pages convey the town of Ossining at the end of a month of intermittent snowfall. Boys in twos and threes with shovels are clearing neighbors’ sidewalks. The third sentence has a slight omen:

An occasional older man, impoverished or proud, could be seen daring death with a shovel in hand, clearing steps so that one could get in and out of the house, or using a small snowblower on a driveway in the hope of getting his wife to the supermarket and back before the next snow fell.

“Daring death” is an omen. And the rhythm of the words at the end of the sentence is designed to strengthen the ominous feeling in “the next snow fell.”

The second paragraph also ends with the thump-thump-thump of monosyllabic words:

It seemed impossible that spring might come, and that these humped gray masses would eventually vanish as water into the heel-hard ground.

I then lift the reader’s spirit with a sight of “huge evergreens dusted with snow, and above them the bare webs of leafless silver maples reflecting sunlight.” We see young children enjoying the snow. During a brief tour, we find out we are in the richest county of the United States, but the center of the village of Ossining has numerous empty storefronts. Nearby homes have been fled from. And another omen central to the book looms:

The biggest drain on taxes was, of course, the schools, in which violence was not unknown.

And soon another:

It was not an unusual town in a country on the decline after only two centuries.

In the next paragraph—still on page two—we find out that the most famous site in that village is Sing Sing prison, known throughout the world. And we, innocently it seems, then find ourselves watching the protagonist, a young man named Ed Japhet, practicing magic tricks in front of a large mirror in his parents’ bedroom. Of course I could have started with that scene, but I preferred the gentle buildup of omens that something is wrong in the village where the action takes place, in the country, perhaps in the world. The reader’s apprehension has been raised. Something is going to happen. And it does.

Sometimes a single omen can do the work of several if it starts the engine of the novel. A novel is like a car—it won’t go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The “engine” of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision
not to put the book down.
The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.

Josiah Bunting, novelist and college president, had a penchant for finding the place where the engine turned on in other people’s books. He read a novel of mine called
The Childkeeper
in manuscript and immediately pointed to the place where the engine started. It’s here as an example of how even a slight omen can encourage the reader to keep reading.

In the first two pages we learn that Roger Maxwell, a banker content with wife and children, has just received a promotion that enables him to buy a new house for his family. Friends put him on to the best real estate agent in the vicinity of Chappaqua and Pleasantville, a man named Stickney.

On the phone, Stickney asks a few questions. Note how innocuous they seem:

“Children?” asked Stickney.

“Four,” said Roger. “One’s away at college, but we’ve got to keep a room for him.”

“Guests?”

“Sometimes. Especially the children. They like to have their friends sleep over.”

And so it goes for a few more lines, while Stickney flips through his cards listing houses that might be suitable. Then he says:

“Could you come up Sunday, say at two?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll bring the children?”

“Yes.”

Stickney was pleased. Children were part of his strategy.

That last sentence, according to Josiah Bunting, was when the engine turned on. As it happens, we soon learn that Stickney intends to sell Maxwell a house that’s a haven for children. It has a huge two-story room with bunk beds made of canoes and a forest of stuffed animals. The novel, published in 1975, long before child abuse became a front-burner topic, was about its opposite, parent abuse. We see evidence of that in the most ordinary context, bit by bit, until the story explodes.

The only hint of the theme is in the epigraph that appears before page one. Epigraphs, please note, can be useful omens. I turned a saying of Oscar Wilde’s on its head:

Parents begin by loving their children; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.