Grand Openings

There are as many ways to begin a story as there are stories to begin. But they are tricky things. Where to begin? Where best to focus the reader's attention? What needs to be accomplished? Today's Novel Matters Roundtable is about opening paragraphs. What do we each look for in an opening, and we will each share the openings from our books.
The bonus of this roundtable is that we are holding a mini-contest! In the comments section, post the opening paragraph from ONE of your novels. All six of us will read the comments and offer our thoughts as we are able. One winner will be chosen to receive a Teeth and Bones edit of their first chapter. The winner will be drawn randomly from the comments section. Please ensure you post ONLY the opening PARAGRAPH of your novel.

For me, there are three things I look for in a beginning (things that capture my attention), 1) Story world--you could call this setting. But it's the way the writer was able to plant my feet

inside the place and time where the story takes place. 2) Narrator--Who is telling this story and why does it need to be told now? and 3) Movement and/or promise of plot--I like to see a little something up front that tells me this story is going somewhere, it has movement. I don't read much genre fiction, so I don't need my plot served hot in the first lines, but I do like some inkling of plot near the beginning.

Here are openings from two of my works:

1) Talking to the Dead:

Kevin was dead and the people in my house wouldn't go home. They mingled after the funeral, eating sandwiches, drinking tea, and spoke in muffled tones. I didn't feel grateful for their presence. I felt exactly nothing.

2) A Girl Named Fish (the novel I completed a week ago):

The population of Picture Island, Maine is arranged in a horseshoe configuration around the open grave, one in back of the other four or five deep. It’s raining hard and they’re frozen to the bone under the black awning of umbrellas. Why does it always rain at funerals? It’s spring but the rain is as cold as if the clouds had scooped the freezing ocean waters and dumped it down their backs. The wind howls up the cliffs to where they are gathered—a cemetery on a high cliff overlooking the sea. The rain slants so it drives sideways into their faces. People try to look reverently miserable, as if it’s mortality they’re contemplating and not their warm houses and maybe some buttered toast with tea and the weekly paper by the fireplace.

If you find it striking that both these novels open with a funeral, well, so do I. My approach is to create miniatu

res inside the scenes and paragraphs of the novel, so that each piece tells part of the whole, and also tells a mini-story of it's own that explores a theme found in other places in the novel.

Let's hear from the others:

What I look for in an opening paragraph is A) Voice -- which tells me right off the bat how I'm going to feel about the character. I want to feel an affinity with either the words or thoughts of the speaker; B) Promise -- what the story holds in store for me. I'll invest several hours in reading the book, so I want to know it will be worth my while; and C) Tone -- is this a serious read or will there be some humor weaved in. I love a touch of humor, even in a serious novel.

Here is the opening from my novel, Unraveled, which I hope will be released in November:

I lost my faith at twenty-four. Well, that isn't true. I didn't lose it, I left it. On a mission field in Moldova, amidst the sunflowers. Just took it off like a vesture discarded. Not outgrown. Discarded. It left me feeling exposed, I'll admit, but I figure if God isn't capable of protecting the weakest among us, well I'd just reather work for someone else. Oh sure, he makes it plain as day that pure and undefiled religion is caring for the widows and orphans, as if it's my job and not his. and that was the thing, he let us down in the worst way. So, I tipped my hat and shook the dust off my feet.

And this is from my most recently completed novel, The Color of Sorrow Isn't Blue:

Grief, it is said, is a sea that ebbs and flows. Comes in waves that roll over the shore, then recedes in a dizzying, lose-your-footing-in-the-sand sensation, leaving you unsettled but standing. Well. Whoever said that never felt the tsunami effect, the drowing, sucking, tidal wave of grief. I know, because I haven't come up for air in five days short

of a year. A suffocating, black hole of a year, each day collapsing in on itself like sand too long unwatered.

As per my usual, I'm going to cheat. Stylistically, I usually start my novels with a one-sentence paragraph, a grabber. L

ike the others, I'm looking to establish voice and a tone. Here's my first paragraph+ for Like a Watered Garden:

I received a box of flowers from my dead husband.

That's a stretch. They weren't flowers at all but a dozen montbretia bulbs. They looked like

hazelnuts with ponytails. Blooms wouldn't show up until July, I figured, if they showed up at all. The UPS man had hidden the box under the welcome mat. His clumsy attempt at security amused me until I remembered I hadn’t ordered anything from a seed catalog last fall. Far from it. Within a heartbeat, I knew the flowers—because that was what he had intended them to be—were from Scott.

Here's an example of a very different voice from my novel, Seeing Things:

You’re talking to the queen of skepticism right here.

I roll my eyes over newspaper stories where teary-eyed folks report they’ve seen Jesus in a potato chip. That sort of hogwash sends me straight to the comics for a dose of reality. You don’t have to worry about me. I know Alley Oop doesn’t slide through time, but the inhabitants of Moo remind me of my friends in Ouray with their common sense and heave-ho attitudes, something sorely missing among the potato chip crowd. Honestly, someone isn’t rowing

with both oars in the water.

I look for deliciousness - a hard to define quality of voice or mood that tells me I'm going to lovespending time inthe three hundred pages or so to come. Here's my two:

The woman stood atop the cinnamon bluff, her arms stretched to the horizons, her face dry as sandstone, her silver hair blowing like the grass at her feet. "She thinks she's Moses," muttered Data, peering through a gap between drawn blinds.- From To Dance In the Desert

They're just decorations, these candles. You don't need anything to pray. Truly, it is best to come with nothing-only yourself. Just one of the things I've learned.
- From The Feast of Saint Bertie

When I open to the first chapter of a book, I hope to find something fresh - some indication that the story is different than others I've read. I also look for the tone in the first paragraph and for some indication of the plot. But, truthfully, what strikes me as promising can change with how I'm feeling when I pick up a book, whether I'm in the mood for a light, entertaining read or a more engrossing story.

Here is the first paragraph from Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon:
"We weren't strangers to this courtroom. The first time we came, it was to petition to have Ginger's hospital birth records opened. When you lose a child to a genetic disease that doesn't haunt your family, you want to know why."

Here is the first paragraph of an untitled WIP I'm toying around with right now:
"Grover is an ink blot on a Google map - a Rorschach's splatter of asphalt and advertising tucked into a fold of brown hills. At least, from May through September, between the rains. Otherwise, the hills are fuzzy and green as moldy bread."

Maybe because I love mysteries, I want an opening paragraph to create a big question mark in my mind, one that forces me to keep reading.

I've attempted to do that in the following opening to my first attempt at a type of Biblical speculative fiction:
Last night I dreamed the dream again, and for the only time I dreamed it, of all the times I dreamed it, it brought me the least fear last night.

Now it's your turn: All comments are allowed, of course. If you want to enter the Teeth and Bones contest for a chance to have your first chapter read and commented on by one of us, then enter your opening paragraph in the comments section. Otherwise: What kinds of things capture your attention in an opening? Have you flipped open a novel, read the first bit and felt, ahhh THIS is what I'm looking for! Tell us!

Teeth and Bones Editing Contest: Is Editing Worth All the Pain?

Several weeks ago Novel Matters held the Teeth and Bones Editing Contest - and Ellen was our

winner. Since that time, she's been through some intense stuff. As I promised in the contest, it was truly
my teeth on her bones. It hurt. Lots.

I don't relish that fact. But I am so proud of Ellen. She's taken her story to a whole new level (and it didn't happen in one sweet leap, either. It was more like a long trek up Mount Everest), and I couldn't be more proud of her.

The truth is, writing is difficult. It takes a level of dedication and creativity that is more rare than it may seem to the casual observer. A typical conversation I have with people who tell me they have a novel in the m:
Person: I want to be a writer.

Me: Are you crazy?

Person: You wr ite.

Me: Yeah, but I'm crazy.

Here's Ellen's own words about the editing process she's been through.

The substantive editing process has been enlightening and . . . stressful.

The first week I struggled to absorb Bonnie’s instruction concerning concept, central moral problem, storyteller and characterization. I wrote a new beginning to define some of these elements and attacked the synopsis, the third such rewrite and not the last, altered some plot points, pondered one major concept that was called into question (decided to keep it, but with a backup plan) and learned more about the central moral problem of my hero.

Week two, I hit bottom, cried and moaned “I-don’t-have-what-it-takes,” then got back on the keyboard, found additional resources online and redid that synopsis (that hadn’t made synopsis status yet), deliberated over my hero’s faults (to be real, he had to have some) and submitted the new synopsi s and ch.1.

Week three, Bonnie applied the line edit and I found myself in a sea of red. Really, really thought I might drown. Hours of rethinking later, I had a new improved ch.1, original ch.1 now ch.2, more plot points defined (why didn’t I think of these before?) and that troublesome synopsis in rewrites four, fiv e, then six.

Week four, I submitted the edited ch. 1and hooray! It passed muster. At week’s end, I submitted the edited and retooled synopsis. Will it make the cut? Still wading through that sea of red on what is now chapter 2. I have a new list of scenes to write and realize I’m only one third through my novel, not half way, especially when I finish applying the ed iting process.

I am very thankful to have had this opportunity. It’s been an extreme learning experience and timely. More than ever, I’m sold on the idea of crafting a synopsis before writing the story. Hopefully, my writing has improved a notch and will reflect the new skills I’ve learned. Perhaps most important, I’ve learned to be flexible and open to alternatives throughout the writing process. I am in awe of each of you writers that has undergone this process multiple times.

So, Ellen is off and running with her new story, right? Uh. Not so much. It's been a week or so since she wrote these paragraphs, and in that time she sent me a new synopsis to read. I was nearly 3/4 of the way through the synopsis before I read a couple of lines that really got me. And I thought, "THIS is where the story starts!" I wrote Ellen, asking her to please not hate me, BUT, I think the novel should start much, much later into the story than she had planned. Oh, and if she agreed with me, then the novel would have a different theme, plot, and character arc.

Ellen is a trooper. She spent some time fiddling with my ideas and agreed. Suddenly, after so much work, so much planning, thinking, changing, crying, praying, planning and rethinking, we were on to something that both of us got pretty excited about. A story to really sink your teeth into. In many ways, it's a different story than she had first started to write. In other ways, it's the same story (at least in terms of the background and the characters and certain events).

Wan t a sample of the changes and growth Ellen has experienced? Absolutely! Here is the original first paragraphs Ellen submitted to me. Right after is Ellen's edited work with the new direction of the novel.

The young boy snapped awake, the pinching grip on his shoulder roughly yanking him from his deep sleep. The bed jerked under the kick of a booted foot as a voice in the dark snapped. “Five minutes!”

W e’re going hunting. Great. Patrick jumped from his bed. It wouldn’t bode well for him if he caused father to wait. Not that he was his real dad. No, this was his stepdad. And having a peaceful day with him meant… how did mom put it? Stepping on egg shells. Yes, you just did what you were told to do and hoped it would be enough…to avoid a whipping.

And the new beginning:

The handwritten missive began, ‘My Precious One.’ A chill swept his body through rising anguish. He plunged on reading words of proposed comfort that assaulted him like hot coals. The final words, Abba Father, crumpled in his fist as he wadded the letter and threw it on the floor. Decision made, his heart was as stone, hardened to both his past and his future, the present now irrelevant.

With eyes red and swollen from his earlier grief, Patrick plunged his heel onto the balled letter, stomping and shredding as hate shredded his heart, cries of denial filling the room.

“Never. NEVER. I do NOT accept you as my Father. Leave me be.” The words screamed from his mouth. “I DENY YOU. I DENY YOUR RIGHT TO ME, GOD. LEAVE ME ALONE.”

He did not stop until he was hoarse.

He’d expected to find that letter waiting for him. As always, it had been simply addressed Patrick. When he walked away, the letter lay in pieces on the floor.

So, in the end, we have a new beginning. And I know the journey is far from over for Ellen, but she's on a bright (exhausting) track.
What do you think? Do you have the dig in deep gumption it takes to be a writer? Do you think your bones can stand the editor's teeth? You'll soon have another opportunity to find out. :)
Mean time, please take a minute to offer your warm thoughts for Ellen, and to share with us your thoughts (fears?), and hopes for an editing process of your own.