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?
When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”