A couple of stray tidbits for your daily (weekly, hourly, etc.) writerly use…
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First: You may have noticed agent Nathan Bransford’s recent contest, for which he invited readers to submit as contest entries the first paragraphs of their own works-in-progress. (He announced the winners yesterday.)
Regular RAMH commenter Froog has been observing Nathan’s contest as well. But Froog goes on to wonder if the contest winners would have been his own choices. He goes yet further, to solicit input from the aether: what examples can you offer of good first paragraphs from already published works?
Note that this informal survey (as Froog concedes) will not yield objective results. It’s more: what do readers (and writers) like?
I’ll drop a favorite from one book or another over there later today, when I’m closer to books I might quote from. In the meantime, if you’ve got a candidate, please do visit Froog’s “Good Beginnings” post and offer yours.
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Second: The Missus and I are doing some rearrangement of things around the house to prepare for *shudder* a garage sale. This involves a lot of unshelving of some things, and shelving of others in their place. The latter, in turn, requires that things potentially shelvable be examined. Many of these things have not been examined in, like, whole freaking years. Decades, even.
I came across such an object the other day: a small gray steel box with a flip-open lid. Dimensions: just about right for, oh, say, a few hundred 3×5 index cards. Guess what I found inside?
Clever, very clever, and right you are: a few hundred 3×5 index cards.
The majority of these, blank front and back, promptly found themselves being shredded. The others — all in my handwriting — recorded two sorts of information:
- Bibliographic information for a book which I apparently once considered writing. I haven’t looked closely at these, because I was so distracted by #…
- Notes about confidence games, gypsies, rigged carnival games, and so on. In this stack appear quotations from a strange assortment of sources — nursery rhymes, a letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, an essay by a La Rochefoucauld (presumably this one), physicist Freeman Dyson‘s autobiographical Disturbing the Universe, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Butler…
I couldn’t quite make sense of the quotations, that is, why they’re clipped together with the con-game (etc.) notes. The best theory I’ve come up with so far says that they may be possible epigraphs, maybe even for the con-game (etc.) book — although (again) the connection really isn’t clear.
But once I thought of them as epigraphs, I started to think of other books or stories which they might inspire. So let’s consider them as found epigraphs, then: writing prompts, if you want to call them that. Story starters. Kicks in a procrastinating seat of the pants.
I’ll post one here every now and then. Beginning with this one, at the top of the stack:
The Derby Ram (nursery rhyme)
The man that killed the ram, sir,
Was up to his knees in blood.
And the boy that held the pail, sir,
Was carried away in the flood.
Thoughts? Suppose you were working on a story which didn’t depict these events literally, but still used this epigraph; what might that story be like?
I had a bunch of old story starts years ago. But somewhere along the way, I lost them all. I have a new set now, but I don’t start stories the same way I used to, and I’ve grown so much what I wrote isn’t any use any longer. I have to start over with them from scratch.
It’s also interesting to re-read those things and discover how an idea I thought would make a good story then seems to suck like an Electrolux now. And so many of these “ideas” really … well, they’re just not.
The ones that survive have to be re-thought in a current mindset and from my current knowledge base. It’s weird. Sometimes they springboard into something new; other times I find them unworkable.
Darc: By “story starts” you mean, like, actual words? or just ideas?
This is one of those loopy things I like to use GMail for: a scratch pad that I can access anywhere I’ve got an Internet connection. What I do is create a message, give it a meaningful subject, be sure to leave all addressee fields blank (very important :)), and then whenever I enter something in the message field just save it as a draft. Then I just keep editing it, forever, always saving it as a draft.
Currently, I’ve got 77 draft messages. Heh.
My own worst Electrolux stories are the ones I wrote before I got my first PC. Not (Lord knows) that what I’ve done since then has been so amazing. BUT those really old ones were such a pain to revise that once I got through (say) 2 versions, a given story was as done as it was ever gonna get!
The epigram makes me think of something used in a Hannibal Lector…although I don’t suppose it was. But it could have been. Just a little something to make you think.
Thanks for the link, JES. No-one else has stopped by yet, but I liked your T.C. Boyle offering (tempted to find the book and see where it goes).
I suppose the nursery rhyme is really about the idea of things of unusual character or abnormal size… or just tall stories. If you choose to play on that, you’ve got almost limitless scope for story ideas.
However, the ‘flood of blood’ image is so grim and so dominant that it’s difficult to focus on anything else. I’m often tempted to try some speculative fiction on the collapse of China (or another major nation) in the near future. I suppose the ram at the centre of it all might point us towards the consequences of a political assassination – the ‘flood of blood’ requires probably not just one death but riots, anarchy, civil war. Nasty.
Didn’t you have a quotation from Bobby Dupea on your blog here somewhere? Suddenly seems to have disappeared. I was thinking of titling my post ‘Auspicious Beginnings’.
I’ve had two garage sales. Never again. But hey, good luck with yours!
As for that little rhyme… It seems like the story of a father who gets his son involved with a scam, and the son is the one pays the big price.
And recaptcha says: winner up
All: Interesting seeing how everyone interprets that little rhyme as an epigraph… My own sense is that some tragedy would unfold in the book — not necessarily involving a little boy, but certainly an innocent, “carried away in the flood” of some awful crime committed by an adult. Actually, it wouldn’t even have to be a crime as such: just some sort of unthinking and/or cruel/heinous act, in which the spilt blood was only metaphorical.
Froog: The Bobby Dupea quote only appears before the first comment has been posted for a given blog entry. Once the comment is saved, succeeding commenters on that post don’t see it. The quote is something like “I’m looking… for auspicious beginnings.” :)
P.S. to Marta: your comment was #9999 in RAMH‘s history! Unfortunately, the comment-counting system here counts spam, too, so #10,000 is lost to us.
(The next comment, by Jules, came in at something like 10,146. LOTS of spam, obviously. :))