Chapter 24

Beginnings

Being in the entertainment business, your primary tasks are to hook the reader, then keep the reader reading, Kurt exhorted in workshops.

Let’s start with hooking the reader.

Novices often think engaging the reader means immediately staging something outlandish or stunningly dramatic.

Beginners also confuse withholding information with suspense. They suppose a murky situation will make the reader want to find out what’s going on. But what it really does is make the reader feel stupid and left out.

In 1980, an interviewer said to Vonnegut, “I was interested in hearing you insist that a writer should set the stage early because I can think of very few writers who convey more information and impressions in the first few pages than you.”

Vonnegut learned that from magazine editors.

You had to do what they told you to do or you couldn’t sell them a story. To a great extent they wanted the same thing a good newspaper wants: an arresting lead, lucid prose, an immediate sense of place. When I teach now I frequently get annoyed when I get four paragraphs into a story and still don’t know what city, or even what century, the characters are in. I have a right to be annoyed too. A reader has a right, and a need, to learn immediately what sort of people he’s encountering, what sort of locale they’re in, what they do for a living, whether they’re rich or poor—all of these things make subsequent information that much more marvelous.276

So “hooking the reader” means employing an “arresting lead.” Not dramatic hyperbole or obfuscation, but arousing curiosity through informing.

One of my beginning students started his first stories with a murder/divorce/arrest, or a kidnapping/drug heist/abortion—you name three or four dramatic events and he had them all there in the opening two paragraphs. The characters were incidental. It turned out he was an avid NYPD fan. Eventually he learned to clue the reader in on who the people were, where they were, and to narrow his focus and build up to a single conflict.

Another opened a novel with the violent death of the narrator’s mother. Whether caused by suicide or murder remained unclear until the end of the novel, so the reader was left in the dark throughout, unable to get a grip on the tangled relationships, emotions and motives of the characters.

My own novel’s opening suffered as well. I adhered to my character, who wanted to suppress her trauma, at the expense of letting my readers in on what it was she wanted to suppress.

Besides teaching fiction writing for most of my adult life, I’ve been the fiction editor of Bellevue Literary Review for twelve years. Bellevue Literary Review publishes semiannually, ten to twelve stories an issue. We receive, on average, 2,000 fiction manuscripts a year; they’re divided among first readers, then editors. I have now considered approximately 2,100 stories for publication. I’ve edited over a hundred. I’ve learned a lot about writing, being on this editorial side of the fence. One of the most important things is that almost all stories have problems with the setup.

These problems usually entail not furnishing enough information for the reader to easily grasp the who-what-where-when of the situation, using fancy prose that makes the reader stumble, or not getting quickly enough to the central conflict.

Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #8:

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.277

With such an introduction, you will be behaving like “a good date on a blind date” as Vonnegut suggests you ought to do.278 You are inviting your blind date to join you, so that he or she can get in on the action and understand what’s happening and what it means and experience its impact, instead of being left out in the cold.

The last sentences of Rule #8 contradict another major Vonnegut edict:

Don’t be predictable. End your sentences with something unexpected. Keep me awake.279

Vonnegut applied hyperbole and cockroaches to emphasize the main point.

Elsewhere in “Creative Writing 101,” he says simply,

Remember my rule number eight? “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible”? That’s so they can play along.280

Unlike the people you’ve been writing for most of your life—your teachers, other students—editors and general readers are not required to read what you’ve written. And they won’t, if you don’t follow Vonnegut’s primary exhortations.

In fact, it’s an editor’s job to weed out the chaff from the wheat. If something doesn’t entice or bewilders, an editor—forced to make many choices for many reasons among many manuscripts—will find relief in having solid reasons to remove a piece from consideration out of her high pile of submissions.

The reverse is also true: when a piece is solid and engaging, an editor will feel relief—and delight—at hitting sure gold.

“Throw out the first two pages!” Vonnegut would say over and over in class, responding to a story. Later he converted that into “Creative Writing 101” Rule #5: “Start as close to the end as possible.”281

“Throw out the first two pages” is better advice, to my mind.

How can you know how close you are to the end if you haven’t yet written it?

Both address a penchant people have for warming up to their story—getting their engines going, as it were—and so beginning long before the story quickens. Sometimes doing a first draft, novelists in particular may think they are writing when what they’re doing is more akin to composing narrative notes. Sometimes the characters and subject demand emotional fortitude, so the writer eases into tender, painful places with digression and window dressing. Sometimes the writer doesn’t quite know what the story is about, and rambles around in search of it.

These discardable “first two pages” may be necessary for the writer in composing the story. They may indeed become expendable. But you do not have to accomplish all the acrobatic tasks required for the beginning when you begin writing the story. Start however you start. The time to worry about perfecting the opening is later, in the revision process. Unless you’re a painstaking, sentence-by-sentence “basher” like Vonnegut, and a leathery old cowhand at writing, you’re better off throwing out than trying to start perfectly close to the end.

If you’ve got the hang of narrative and as you gain experience, short story beginnings will start to come more readily. But especially with novels, you may not know what you’re truly writing about for many, many pages. Things appear, a new wind stirs up, sailing you in another direction or to a deeper place. It would be impossible, then, to set up a beginning to fit the rest, if you’ve no idea what the rest will lead to.

Once you do know, then yes, “start as close to the action as you can.”

Vonnegut’s friend Sidney Offit offers a great example: “I was working at Fantasy and Science Fiction. A story came in that was set on Mars but the first three or four pages were about the construction of the space ship. It was good but slow going. When I showed it to the editor there, Anthony Boucher, he said, ‘cut it.’… The first line for this story is, ‘When the space ship landed on Mars.’”282

You don’t have to build the ship. Just get the ship going.

When that thing lands, something is going to happen. You’ve snagged the reader’s curiosity.

When still a child, I read my mother’s original edition of Gone with the Wind, and I read it twice more by high school graduation. Its first line is etched on my brain: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.”

Men! Not just the Tarleton twins! So a not-beautiful girl could still be a charmer! Capture male attention! What girl or woman would not be hooked? What man wouldn’t either?

The next sentences describe Scarlett vividly. Then the first line of the second paragraph provides all the who-what-where-when info the reader needs to play along: “Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father’s plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture.”

No wonder it was an immediate best seller. We are whisked into context, contrast, into place, time, class, and an intriguing character. It’s over a thousand pages, and by the third paragraph, we know it’s hot outside, Scarlett’s rich, charming, young, and eligible; we know she lives on her father’s plantation, the name of it, that he owns slaves, and that it’s springtime in the slave-holding South, just before the Civil War.283

Even in his first published stories and novels, Vonnegut sets the stage right away with information that lends suspense. Here’s a sampler of opening paragraphs from the novels, in chronological order by publication date:

Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.

In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.284

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.285

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.286

Here are short story setting-the-stage samples, starting with Vonnegut’s first publication:

Let me begin by saying that I don’t know any more about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does. Save for one short, enigmatic message left in my mailbox on Christmas Eve, I have not heard from him since his disappearance a year and a half ago.287

I don’t suppose the oldsters, those of us who weren’t born into it, will ever feel quite at home being amphibious—amphibious in the new sense of the word. I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don’t matter any more.288

So Pete Crocker, the sheriff of Barnstable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis one May afternoon—and he told the two six-foot Hostesses there that they weren’t to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believed headed for the Cape.289

Concluding his instructions for “Creative Writing 101,” Vonnegut makes this pronouncement:

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.290

“The last story in Dubliners, ‘The Dead,’ is not reader-friendly,” Kurt told Gail Godwin. “In the first two pages, you’ve met nine people. You must not do this!”291

“One of Kurt’s few mantras was ‘Never start a story with a question,’” Ronni Sandroff, another former Iowa student, recalls. “Of course I had to give it a try. My story was about a male college student who had wrangled a summer job on the assembly line at a Bronx bread factory, where his pampered piano-playing hands and ego got roughed over. Vonnegut was a total good sport. He told the class he’d found an opening line—‘Who’s bleeding on the hot cross buns?’—that was a good example of how to break that rule.”292

Kurt remarked to Gail Godwin a few years later,

Of course I had students who refused to take my advice. Remember Ronni? She turned in a story whose first sentence was “Listen, you dumb motherfuckers.” I said, “Listen, Ronni, you just can’t do that.” But she did.293

“Listen, you dumb motherfuckers,” wasn’t Ronni’s actual line; “Who’s bleeding on the hot cross buns?” was. Maybe Vonnegut substituted that phrase because the reason to avoid starting a story with a question is that doing so makes the reader feel like a dumb motherfucker—not knowing who’s asking, from where, about what, to whom.