Category Archives: first sentences

a shape to view

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In 1985 Russell Banks wrote “Sarah Cole:  A Type of Love Story.”  It was first published in The Missouri Review, then in The Best img_1443American Short Stories 1985, then in The Angel on the Roof.  You can also listen to it on a podcast.

The first sentence:  “To begin, then, here is a scene in which I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman.”

img_1444One of the interesting things about this story is the point of view.  Which switches between first person and third person.

The narrator writes, “I’m telling it this way because what I have to tell you now confuses me, embarrasses me, and makes me sad…”

The story is divided into eight sections with the point of view as follows :

I-1st to 3rd

II-1st to 3rd to 1st

III-3rd to 1st to 3rdimg_1446

IV-1st to 3rd

V-1st

VI-1st

VII-3rd to 1st

VIII-3rd

23 pages.  Way cool.

dirt music

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img_1398Dirt Music by Tim Winton is a character-rich, character-driven novel, with lots of plot and an equally strong sense of place.  What a read!  It’s written in short little unmarked sections–little moments that patch together the characters of Georgie Jutland and Lu Fox.

The first sentence of the novel, about Georgie:  “One night in November, another that had somehow become morning while she sat there, Georgie Jutland looked up to see her pale and furious face reflected in the window.”

Here’s the first one about Lu:  “Out in the shed with the dog at his shins he leaves the boat smelling of bleach.”

Dirt music:  “Anything you could play on a verandah.  You know, without electricity.”  But of course it’s more than that.  Tim Winton is an Australian writer, and that’s where this novel takes place.  There’s dirt and weather everywhere.  Rosy dirt, silt, and dust.  Opposing weather systems and typhoons and cyclones.  Killer heat and ocean and survival.

One of my favorite passages: 

“She only knew that love was impossible. It arrived and moved on like the weather and it defied pursuit. Not just romance–any kind of love. The emotion itself was promiscuous and not to be trusted. She’d thought all this before and failed to learn from it. The story of her life.”

Read it before the movie comes out in September (Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell).

full circle

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img_1238In July, I read Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, a writer I’d never read before.  Upon finishing the novel, I immediately wanted to reread it.  Instead, I began a journey that has lasted four months:  reading each of Rachel Cusk’s books in the order she wrote them.  With this post, we come full circle, back to the book that started it all.

Watching Rachel Cusk develop as a writer was like watching a house being built.  With Arlington Park, her most recent book published in 2006, not only is the house built and decorated, but the author is now sitting by the fire with a latte.

Arlington Park is well written and digs deep into truth.  It’s about women–real and flawed.  It’s about marriage.  It’s about not only the lives we plan to live and choose to live, but the lives we end up living.  In an article written in 2005, Cusk said, “I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.”  Arlington Park is one of the best books I read in 2008, and a new addition to my all-time favorite books.

The first sentence:  “All night the rain fell on Arlington Park.”  The falling of rain appears like a refrain throughout the book.  The rain falls on everyone in Arlington Park.  It falls on all of us.

The novel is divided into ten unmarked sections:  1-the rain fell; 2-Juliet; 3-Amanda; 4-Christine, Maisie and Stephanie at the mall; 5-Solly; 6-in the park/the rain had stopped; 7-Juliet; 8-Maisie; 9-Christine; and 10-party at Christine’s with Juliet, Maisie, and Maggie.

The first time I read it, I was so taken with Juliet that I didn’t want to leave her to switch to Amanda.  This time, it did not feel like a brusque change, but felt right.  Because it’s not just about one of us; it’s about all of us.

Here’s a little flavor of what you have to look forward to:

Juliet about a recording of a song by Ravel:  “The sound of it brought tears to Juliet’s eyes. It was the voice, that woman’s voice, so solitary and powerful, so–transcendent. It made Juliet think she could transcend it all, this little house with its stained carpets, its shopping, its flawed people, transcend the grey, rain-sodden distances of Arlington Park; transcend, even her own body, where bitterness lay like lead in the veins. She could open somewhere like a flower…open out all the petals packed inside her.”

Solly about her inability to communicate with a Japanese student renting out their extra room:  “…she became aware of how much of her lay shrouded in this inarticulable darkness.”

Solly:  “Suddenly she saw her life as a breeding ground, a community under a rock…There was a lack of light, a lack of higher purpose to it all. How could she have forgotten to find out what else there was? How could she have stayed there, under her rock, down in the mulch, and forgotten to take a look outside and see what was going on? All at once she didn’t know what she’d been thinking of.”

into the woods

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My story, “Into the Woods,” appears in Storyglossia’s Issue 32, December 2008.img_0994 

Here’s how it starts:  

Georgia was putting Tyler’s baseball schedule into her computer when she heard the racing of a car’s engine, followed by the squeal of tires trying to adhere to pavement, and then the desperate sound of tires screeching to stop.  Finally a silence she filled with— 

maybe it was nothing. 

 

a good story

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img_1095How do you tell a story? 

First sentence:  “The man arrived after morning prayers.” 

The first paragraph goes on to paint the scene of that morning.  “The man waited, and the boys watched…”

The second paragraph drops back to explain:  “Men often came for children.”  There were some more likely to be chosen.  There were others more likely to be passed over.  “Ren was one of them.”

The third paragraph continues:  “He had no memory of a beginning…”

If you want to read a good story, The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, is the book for you.  It is a solid, old-fashioned story–as in, something happens and then something else and then something else.  On Monday night, it won the 2008 John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize. 

In a New York Times review, The Good Thief was described as “an American Dickensian tale with touches of Harry Potterish whimsy, along with a macabre streak of spooky New England history.”

I couldn’t put it down.

who would you be

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img_1007“That’s not what she means,” I said.  “She means, like, we are what’s happened to us.  So if you take away what’s happened to us, then, you know…Well, who would you be?”

“I’d be someone different.”

“Exactly.”

Dialogue from Nick Hornby‘s A Long Way Down.

What is ironic about this bit of dialogue is that in the specific situation of the book, being someone different would be a good thing.  On New Year’s Eve, four people meet on the roof of Toppers’ House, a famous London suicide spot.

Again, good dialogue in a book often leads to a movie.  Nick Hornby has four to his credit:  Fever Pitch (his memoir) a UK and a US version, High Fidelity (novel), and About a Boy (novel).

How to be Good, published in 2001, was the first book of his I read.  A friend loaned it to me, but as soon as it came out in paperback, I bought my own copy. 

The first sentence:  “I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him anymore.”  

Then, “David isn’t even in the car park with me.  He’s home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly’s class teacher.  The other bit just sort of …slips out.”

What Nick Hornby does so well.  The truth made more accessible by humor.  Humor made more poignant by the truth.

family history

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Dani Shapiro is one of my all-time favorite writers.  She knows how to tell a story–how to slowly release details in order to build tension and lure the reader forward. The first book of hers I read was Family History, published in 2003, but which I did not discover until October of 2005.

How does a writer know what to start with?  When to reveal a detail?  What is just enough to keep a reader interested but not so much that the reader has no place in the process?

It begins:

“I lie in bed these days and watch home movies–a useless exercise, to be sure, but I can’t stop myself.  Ned’s an amateur filmmaker, and ever since we got our first video camera when Kate was born, he has documented our family’s life, not just birthday parties and anniversaries but smaller, more telling moments.

I recommend all her books.

  • Playing With Fire, 1989
  • Fugitive Blue, 1993
  • Picturing the Wreck, 1996
  • Slow Motion, 1998
  • Family History, 2003
  • Black & White, 2007

that moment

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“A story,” Graham Greene wrote, “has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”  The End of the Affair.  The first sentence.  Of course, then there was the movie, Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore.  I’m watching it again now.  I left it, a moment ago, to stand on a stool, then lunge to stand on a shelf, to reach the book on the very top shelf.  From the last page, I saw I had read it in August of 2001.  Unfortunately, my paperback references the movie on the cover.  It must have been the only copy I could get my hands on at the time.  I can’t remember the words.  I want to read it again.