Once Upon a Time: Beginnings

“Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”²⁹

Many structural problems are solved when we enter into the worlds of our stories. But other fundamental problems remain. How do we structure our stories temporally, chronologically? And most nagging of all: Where to begin?

Beginnings have always driven writers crazy. Since so much depends on readers being grabbed by the opening words of our novels or stories, we tend to fret over them. We tend to assume that great beginnings are born amid lightning bursts of inspiration—forgetting that most of those great beginnings probably weren’t written as beginnings to begin with. Many or most were arrived at by jumping to a strong passage somewhere deep within the manuscript, a passage written with no intention of grabbing anyone.

Still, whether we consciously write our beginnings or we select them from parts already written, decisions—choices—must be made.

60}BIBLICAL OPENERS:
BEGINNING WITH BACKSTORY

Every word of a story is, in a sense, a beginning. And each beginning is diving off a cliff into the ocean. To have done so and survived is a relief; to contemplate doing so is agony.

In composing this section of the book you are reading, I confront the same problem. I stand at the edge of the cliff asking myself: In discussing beginnings, where to begin? Well—why not with the most famous beginning of all?

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.³⁰

Unlike most of us, God has no problem getting His story off the ground. To be divine helps, as it helps to have a story to tell that truly does begin at the very beginning—and so there’s no question of going back any further, say, to the day before God created the heavens and the earth. Nor is the Bible’s omniscient narrator by any means tempted to drift into flashback or backstory, since, well, there is none.

The same can’t be said for our stories. Whatever beginning we choose, there’s always another behind it, and another behind that. Our stories aren’t those of divine creators, but of mortal men and women whose characters are formed not only by their present circumstances, but also by past experiences. Bergson³¹ declared, “Consciousness is memory.” In creating living characters we can’t overlook what makes them human— namely, their histories, what they remember, and even a few things that they may not remember but which have formed them all the same.

Therefore, implied or overt, every story has a backstory. And since the consciousness of our characters—like our own—reflects the memories and experiences of all those who’ve proceeded them, that backstory goes back and back and back all the way to the beginning of time, all the way to In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth—the theoretical opening line of all our stories.

Fortunately, theory and practice differ—or else all stories would have a biblical prologue, like James Michener’s saga Hawaii:

Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others. It was a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as pacific.

Michener didn’t feel compelled to create the earth first before flooding it. Still, in reaching way, way back for his opener, he suggests the epic proportions of the work to follow. In a similar way Charles Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities epically, with the rhetorical equivalent of what, in a movie, would be a very long, wide-angle crane shot:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Rather than plunge us into the hearts of their stories, each of these openings serves as a sort of framing device—an imposing, ornate gate through which we pass to get to the story (see Meditations # 68–70). Call it the red carpet treatment. But gate and carpeting are there not just to flatter, but to orient us. Along with all the pomp and paradox, Dickens lays out the history of the period in which his story is set, a time when plain-faced queens and large-jawed kings (and vice versa) occupied the thrones of England and France.

61}FINN AGAIN, BEGIN AGAIN: WHEN
STORIES SWALLOW THEIR OWN TALES

Some stories end where they start, and vice versa.

Madison Smartt Bell’s Ten Indians starts: “Don’t know I can say how it all started, but I tell you how it almost finished up.” Similarly, when Orham Pamuk’s My Name Is Red begins, his protagonist is already dead, the corpse speaking to us from the bottom of the well where his murderer has deposited it. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel, likewise comes to us from the beyond, with the narrator in heaven following her brutal rape and murder.

Trading beginnings for endings is an old trick—but not a bad one. Though we may be unsure where to begin our stories, we tend to know how they’ll end. Martin Amis knew:

This is a true story but I can’t believe it’s really happening.

It’s a murder story, too. I can’t believe my luck.

And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in the century, so late in the goddamned day.

This is the story of a murder. It hasn’t happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. And I couldn’t stop them, I don’t think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It’s what she always wanted. You can’t stop people, once they start creating.³²

Amis can’t believe his luck. He knows exactly when and how to begin his story: not with the beginning, but with the end, or close to it.

On the other hand the distinction may be entirely false, since in cases like this who can say that the beginning isn’t the end, and vice versa? This is very much the case with Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s last, most ambitious and least read (and least readable) novel, where beginning and ending are united. Joyce’s novel begins (and ends):

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs.

The same novel ends (and begins):

Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

As never achieved before or since, Joyce solves the problem of beginnings and endings by having neither—and both at once. Like the universe it attempts to hold, Finnegans Wake has no center or boundaries. Also like the universe, some would argue, Joyce’s book has no purpose.

62}A SURFEIT OF BEGINNINGS

Our stories and agendas may be humbler than God’s, or the Bible’s, or Dickens’s, or even those of Mr. Joyce. But we still face the difficulty of beginning. And we face it knowing that, with each of our opening lines, line by line and word by word, we make a covenant with our readers: We lay down the laws of the world that they will live in as long as they keep reading.

So—again—where to begin?

The question needs to be split in two: (1) where do our stories begin, and (2) where do we start telling them?

As storytellers, we’re not obliged to follow any straightforward (linear) timeline of events. Experience exists in a state of flux, a rushing, swirling stream: We can dip or dive in wherever and whenever we choose.

In a story about a woman who has a love affair while vacationing in Venice, we might begin with her first glimpse of her paramour sipping a caffe at an open bar along the Zatterre. With his sweater draped capelike over his broad shoulders, he puts our heroine in mind of a count: Indeed, she learns that he is a count, Count Vittorio Visconte. Or we might start with her boarding the Alitalia flight, or earlier still, when she meets with the travel agent. Or we could begin in the middle of their affair, with the lovers embracing to the sloshing of the canal, or the morning after their first night of lovemaking (alas, Vittorio is impotent). Perhaps we begin with the drive to his palazzo, a dozen miles outside of Venice—which she finds almost in ruins, with fig trees growing throughout and rain coming through holes in the terra-cotta roof. Or does the story start with our heroine packing on the night before her departure, or is she crying her eyes out aboard a Boeing 747 as she flies back home?

Do we telegraph the ending up front, or pave the way to it slowly, slyly, from an auspicious start through a series of reversals?

Any or all—or none—of these hypothetical beginnings might work. To know where the story is going helps; in fact it’s crucial, since the beginning has to at least agree with the ending. Otherwise we may find ourselves in the position of the architect who builds his dream house only to realize, after all of the floors are in place, that he’s neglected to plan the staircase.

63}SLAPPED AND HURRIED ALONG:
LITERARY BIRTHS

Though most writers prefer to dive straight into the centers of their stories, beginning at the beginning has advantages. It lets readers experience events “in real time,” as they unfold, without having to make temporal adjustments as they go. Real life happens this way, so why not fictional life? In fact many stories (usually longer ones, novels) begin at the beginning of their protagonist’s lives, with their births. Remember Robinson Crusoe?

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family ...

Since Defoe used the technique in 1719, other writers have given birth to their protagonists before our eyes, on the first page. Dickens titles chapter 1 of David Copperfield “I am born,” and opens with his narrator wondering whether he’ll turn out to be the hero of the novel we hold—a doubt we don’t share, having seen the words David Copperfield stamped across the book’s title page. As opening gambits go, it’s not especially sincere, so we can’t entirely blame Holden Caulfield when, a hundred and one years later, he calls it crap:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Holden’s views notwithstanding, among more than a few contemporary authors Dickens’ strategy still holds:

I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time.

—SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight’s Children

The child was born on a night of moon and thunder and a wind that sang high, sweet and clear, naming this a night of miracles.

—KATHRYN LYNN DAVIS, Sing to Me of Dreams

I was born inside the belly of a white elephant during a thirty-day dry Nor’easter.

—CHRISTOPHER COOK GILMORE, Atlantic City Proof

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

—JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Middlesex

The narrator of The Magus, John Fowles’s first novel, describes his origins only to point out that they’re the wrong origins, unsuited to what fate has in store for him. No sooner does he present us with his past than he tosses it into the weeds like roadkill:

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing public service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover that I was not the person I wanted to be.

I had long before discovered that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed …

By contrast, the eponymous hero of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is all too aware of the import of his birth—an awareness not shared by his parents:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

One obvious disadvantage of starting our stories with the birth of our heroes is that the experience isn’t likely to form part of our hero’s consciousness, since it can’t possibly be remembered. Well, most of us don’t remember being born. As with all things fictional, here too we find exceptions:

I was slapped and hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—the blind boy’s rose-and-milk-and-gray-walled (and salty) aquarium, the aquarium overthrown, the uproar in the woman-barn ...

Thus Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul (which runs away to 833 pages and took Brodkey twenty-seven years to write) squares up to us with the audacity of a man who dares—dares—to tell us what colors he saw in the womb. We are thereby more than sufficiently prepared for the coming performance. And “performance” is the word: Brodkey’s protagonist has yet to emerge and already the world applauds, or so he imagines.

64}IN MEDIAS RES: NOT A DINOSAUR

The trouble with beginning our stories at the beginning is that the story, if it has begun at all, has barely begun. It will take some time to warm up before we bring it up to speed on the highway.

This is why most stories start in medias res (Latin for “in the middle of things”). The ancient Roman poet Horace advised aspiring epic poets to go straight to the heart of their stories instead of starting at the beginning. That “heart” may be somewhere near the end of the string of events that form a story, but the idea is to begin the telling with the action already underway.

Katherine Shonk’s 2001 story, “My Mother’s Garden,” about a woman trying to convince her mother to abandon her home in a suburb of Chernobyl, begins in medias res:

Spring had come to my hometown. When I got off the bus at the entrance to the contamination zone, Oles was standing at the guard station in a lightweight uniform instead of his padded military jacket, his gun swung loosely over his back. The thaw seemed to have improved his unusually sullen mood; he nodded his appreciation of the flowered fabric I’d brought for his wife and let me pass through the gate without even looking at my documents.

Typically, though they may start in the middle of the protagonist’s journey through life, stories that start in medias res don’t actually start in the middle of the story itself. Instead they start with or close to an inciting incident: an event that propels the protagonist out of her status quo and into new circumstances that put that status quo in new perspective. Shonk starts this way, with the arrival of the daughter to her mother’s doomed home— and not, as she might have, with her learning about the Chernobyl disaster.

65}SETTING OUR STORIES ON FIRE:
THE INCITING INCIDENT

Most contemporary narratives are written with the inciting incident occurring (or alluded to) within the first page or pages. Here is the opening to Scott Spencer’s novel Endless Love, about a boy whose obsessive adolescent love affair leads to tragedy:

When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved—I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now, years have passed and that night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.

That was the night when, in a bid to gain his beloved’s attention, David Axelrod set her house on fire, nearly killing her and her family. Starting with that crisis, we discover the obsessive love affair that led to this act, an affair that the novel’s next hundred pages re-create. That’s a long flashback, long enough to indicate that the fire scene is really a framing device (see Meditation # 70). However since the novel extends to 418 pages, with most of the plot resulting from that action, the fire still qualifies as an inciting incident.

Often the inciting incident is conveyed by the first sentence:

1. They threw me off the hay truck at noon.

2. None of them knew the color of the sky.

3. One August afternoon, when Ajay was ten years old, his elder brother, Aman, dove into a pool and struck his head on the cement bottom.

The first quote, from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, explains how Frank, a drifter, winds up at the diner where he falls for Cora, wife of Nick “The Greek” Papadakis, the diner’s owner, whom Frank and Cora eventually plot to murder. Had Frank not been thrown off that hay truck, the most famous crime novel ever would lack an inciting incident.

In Quote # 2, the characters in Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” don’t know the color of the sky because they’re too busy rowing, or hanging their heads in exhaustion, aboard the lifeboat that has delivered them from a shipwreck—the inciting incident.

Quote # 3 is from Akhil Sharma’s short story “Surrounded by Sleep,” about a young Indian boy who believes himself marked by his brother’s accident; to comfort himself, he conjures a cardigan-wearing God, half Clark Kent, half Mr. Rogers. The demarcation between Ajay’s previous (status quo) existence as a happy child and his present exceptional circumstances is clearly marked. To begin with the pool accident seems not only wise, but compulsory.

In other stories, the inciting incident is less dramatic. In John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Neddy Merrill’s decision to swim across the county by way of a string of swimming pools has no motivating event beyond that it’s a nice day, “one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’” Indeed, as much alcohol as water lubricates Ned’s journey home. However whimsically or drunkenly arrived at, Ned’s decision qualifies as an inciting incident, and so Cheever starts there.

66}TESTING FITZGERALD:
GETTING TO THE INCITING INCIDENT

Sometimes the setups of our stories take too long, as in a story about a former small-town football star who finds the answer to his midlife crisis—and a possible means to rekindle an old flame— in joining a third-rate heavy metal band.

The problem is it takes thirteen pages of loud music to get to where Jimbo first sees Stacey after a gap of sixteen years. The author might consider getting to that inciting incident much sooner, perhaps even in the first sentence: “At first he didn’t recognize her, her hair was so short and the strobe lights made her look like some silent movie ghost . . .” Establish the main facts: girlfriend in high school, time gone by, Jimbo’s move to Boston in a failed bid for a law degree, etc. Then flashback to their last moment together—no more than a page—before plunging into the deeply fleshed-out scene of the reunion.

That’s the main dish here—a reunion scene.³³

Once you know what main dish you’re serving—the central action or event that your words are leading the reader toward— then each of those words should set up that action or event, should be a life support system for that dramatic scene.

67}BEGIN IT NOW:
GOING GOETHE’S WAY

“I write the first sentence and trust in God for the next.”

—LAWRENCE STERNE

Often the line between a character’s status quo and the events that thrust him into a brave new existence is too broad or blurry.

In a story about an alcoholic man’s downward spiral, is the inciting incident the alcoholic’s first drink, or his hundred-and-first—the one that he swears will be his last? When does a drunk begin to be a drunk? When he thinks he’s become one, or when his friends tell him so? Or when he wakes up one morning in jail, or in the psychiatric ward of a hospital? Or when he gets fired from his job? Or when his wife and children leave him? Or when he finds himself begging for coins and cigarettes on Skid Row?

We’re stuck with the same old question: Where to begin?

Perhaps the best advice comes from Goethe:

Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred ...

Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

Sure, Johann Wolfgang, but where?

Faced with the choice between beginning nowhere and beginning anywhere, why not begin anywhere? After all, when it comes to our stories, we are gods creating entire worlds. And once you’ve created your world, if you should find that the beginning no longer works, you’ll have a much easier time finding a beginning that does.

In beginning to write we also begin to create boundaries; we create limits. These limits tell us where to go next, and where not to go.