Perilous Adventures
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Love and the First Page

by Kris Olsson

I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It’s life flipping death the bird. I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe. I’m convinced. - Lorrie Moore, Dance in America.

I remember books by their beginnings. This may not be fair. Sometimes, an ordinary beginning leads the reader coquettishly, cleverly, into the multi-layered complexity of a stunning narrative you couldn’t have guessed at by its first page. That’s happened to me enough times, as a reader, to urge me past an opening paragraph that bores or fails to seduce or just doesn’t promise enough, to the next page and the next until suddenly I’m four pages from the end and panicking, wishing there was more. But still, I’m a sucker for that beautiful first page or paragraph. Often, it means the difference between taking a book home and leaving it on the bookshop shelf.

This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness. Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed. The man who is driving could say, “In that field is a castle,” and it would be possible for her to believe him. Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion.

A good opening, a beautiful first paragraph, a gorgeous and enticing beginning – they’re like promises to the reader. This is how it will be, they seem to say, stay with me, there’s more, just like this. And that’s what the writer, the maker of promises, the seducer, has to deal with: a promise that needs to be kept. Never forget that: this is a transaction between you and the reader. This is how it will be, the writer says, and the reader, believing it, will go along. If this is how it will be, they say, if this is what I’m getting not just on the first page but through 300, I’ll come. I’ll throw in my lot with you for the next few weeks, or however long it takes.

When I first saw the child I cannot say. I see myself – I might be three or four years old – playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance. The goatherd is dozing against an olive bole, his head rolled back to show the dark line of his jaw and the sinews of his scraggy neck, the black mouth gaping. Bees shift amongst the herbs. The air glitters. It must be late summer. There are windblown poppies in the grass. A black he-goat is up on his hind legs reaching for vineshoots. David Malouf, An Imaginary Life.

It’s ironic really: the beginning of a book sets the tone of the book, and very often the voice – but how many writers begin at the beginning and write through to the end? Few of us have had the good fortune to start a manuscript with the lines that will eventually adorn its first page. Most of us don’t even know what the story is about when we begin. It isn’t until later, maybe half-way through a first draft, that the light-bulb moment comes. Ahaa, we think when that moment hits,so that’s what I think about this/so that’s what’s on my mind/ so that’s what this book is all about. Usually, that means re-writing, at least in part, the whole first half of the book.

Whenever I see light feathers of snow moving slowly down a window to make a white pillow on the sill, and hear the thin moan of wind through casement cracks in a room where a fireplace is singing with flames, I remember the Christmas when I was nine, and our house at Indian Willows. -Paul Theroux, A Christmas Card.

Still, knowing that as a reader means little to me as I sit writing. What I mean is, I know that intellectually - but the part of me that knows how to start my own novel is hibernating, waiting patiently as I work away, balling up pages and throwing them in the bin, sitting on the delete button, waiting for a voice. When it comes, though, it is unmistakeable, like the voice of the person you love. Oh hello, you say, glad to hear it, and turning back to the beginning to work out what to do.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

And like Marquez’s Dr Juvenal Urbino, we want the smell of something else, we want our lives requited, we want that dizzyingly beautiful first paragraph we read in the bookshop – standing there, oblivious to all, holding the book in our palms – we want that paragraph to go on and on, we want it to lead us somewhere, show us something, we want the whole gorgeous love affair played out right to the end. So don’t stint on it. Wait until you’re ready. Then go back to the first page, put the prettiest fly on your hook, and cast your line. We’ll be yours, in love, hook, line and sinker.

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issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author