Inside a Writer's Head

This message was posted by one of the participants on the Yahoo Group I run for my creative writing courses and it made me smile so much I thought I would pass it on :

Am reading a collection of short stories by Sheila O'Flanagan, and the first story starts like this:

Jennifer Jones sat at the table on her balcony.

No, thought Corinne, that's too boring. It doesn't say anything, doesn't let people know where she is. Or what sort of person she is. Or what might be about to happen to her.

Jennifer Jones watched the crystal-clear water from the chair on her balcony.

But what's she doing sitting down? Corinne asked herself. Why is she sitting around like a lame-ass when she's somewhere gorgeous and exotic? And when she's supposed to be gorgeous and exotic too? And especially when she's supposed to be a sassy action heroine? She shouldn't be sitting anywhere just looking at the sea like a feeble pensioner. (Though pensioners don't have to be feeble. Note to self: how about a pensioner heroine for a future novel? Mightn't that be interesting? Or is that too Agatha Christie? Miss Bloody Marple, of course. Nobody can do a pensioner like Miss Bloody Marple, can they?) Corinne frowned as she looked at her revised opening sentence again. I haven't even said that it's the sea she's looking at, have I? Crystal-clear water could be a lake. I'm still not giving any information about what's going to happen to her at all.

Jennifer Jones... Jennifer Jones... Corinne stared at the open laptop in front of her. Oh bloody hell, she thought. What the hell is going to happen to her? I've no damn idea. She pushed the laptop away from her in disgust and stared out over the blue and white wooden rails of the balcony of Room 404. She sighed deeply. Bloody Jennifer Jones. She loathed the woman. Detested her. Hated her. Abhorred her. Corinne pulled the laptop towards her again and clicked on the thesaurus. Abhor. Abominate. Deplore. Detest. Dislike. Execrate. She frowned. Was execrate a verb? She wasn't sure. She'd never heard of it before. But it would do. If it meant what it was supposed to mean, then she absolutely totally and utterly execrated Jennifer Bloody Jones.

Thought some of the writers here might be able to identify with this! *grin*

Literary Winners

Have to some catching up to do with letting you know about recent winners of literary prizes. Petina Gappah has won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award for her short story collection An Elegy for Easterly. Claire Armistead, chair of the judges, praised the books as a:

...humane and disarmingly funny mosaic of life in Zimbabwe

You can enjoy the first lines from each story on Petina's website, and read about her feelings on winning the prize on her blog. Debut novelist Evie Wyld beat some pretty fierce competition (including Booker winner Aravind Adiga and Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is :

... set in eastern Australia and tells a story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things that they will never know about each other.

PddQ8xLinAc >Louise Doughty, chair of Judges, described the novel as :

... a remarkable book. A sometimes poignant, sometimes comic story of a father and son who have so much in common but never quite connect, it is awash with fine images that linger in the mind. Wyld’s choice of subject matter is both brave and wide-ranging, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to the back country of Eastern Australia, Wyld captures the inflections of male speech and male bonding in a way that feels both acute and realistic. Most importantly, she writes brilliantly, able to paint a picture or create a convincing encounter with a few deft, evocative strokes, in a prose style worthy of our very best writers. There is nothing 'first novelish' about this first novel. It's a fantastically mature book, never showy, a slow burn that drags the reader in.

Wyld was one of Granta's Voices of 2008, and you can catch her talking about her book on YouTube. Then there's the infamous Bad Sex Award in fiction, which I mentioned a few days back. This year it was won by Jonathan Littell. One extract from The Kindly Ones that the judges felt merited the award compares a woman's genitalia and :

a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.

But the award is all about schoolboy sniggering, suggests Oliver Marre in The Telegraph :

It is funny – and also quite satisfying – to see the winner of the Prix Goncourt tittered at like this but the fact remains that his description of sex wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t worse, say, than his description of love or violence when taken out of context.

David Hewson has a very good piece on his blog called Do We Need Sex in Fiction, which I think every potential novelist, wanting to avoid the pitfalls, should read.

Uma's Favourite First Lines

A few days back The American Book Review featured a list of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels, and I tweeted it forward fairly unthinkingly. My fellow Twitter addict and New Straits Times columnist, Umapagan, caught it and mulled it over, and now has come up with a list of titles which he feels to be glaring omissions to the list :

I was looking for a quiet place to die.

The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster

I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water.

Mr. Vertigo, by Paul Auster

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

In a distant and secondhand set of dimension, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling starmists waver and part...

The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett

"They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles."


The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.

Siddharta, by Hermann Hesse

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

... and hands down, what I feel to be, the most perfectly crafted opening sentence in modern literature...

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

Uma. :)

You can find more posts about first lines here. And please do suggest any others you feel are missing!

Ox-Tale Soup

The charity Oxfam (which also just happens to be Europe's biggest retailer of second-hand books) have teamed up with Profile Books to produce Ox-Tales, four volumes of short stories with contributions from 38 authors.

... inspired by one of the four elements. These roughly correspond with the four main areas of Oxfam's work: conflict resolution (fire), water projects (water), climate change (air) and agricultural development (earth).

William Skidelsky, reviewing the collection in The Observer sees this as yet another sign of the current health of the short story in Britain.

The Independent is running a competition to see if readers can match opening paragraphs with their authors. I say never mind trying to work out the answers - these are great examples of how short stories that we all could learn from. Don't you feel pulled right in?

Bad Beginnings

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

If you think this is a dreadful first sentence for a novel - well that's exactly what it is supposed to be! Garrison Spik (pronounced "speak") is the winner of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an international literary parody contest which commemorates Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton.

Entrants submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The whole list of entries makes very enjoyable reading. [Found via.]

L'Engle Dies

Author Madeleine L’Engle has died aged 88. She best known for her 1963 children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time which won the Newbery Medal and has sold 8 million copies. Douglas Martin writes her obituary in The New York Times.

The book has the distinction of being one of the most banned book in the United States: she was

... accused by religious conservatives of offering an inaccurate portrayal of God and nurturing in the young an unholy belief in myth and fantasy.

It also began with one of the most famous first lines in literature:

It was a dark and stormy night ...

Professor Lim's First Lines

Meanwhile, in Starmag today, Prof. Lim Chee Seng, looks at novels with opening lines that grab the reader's attention, including Kafka's Metamorphosis, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Rani Manicka's The Rice Mother. There's 25% off his selected books at Kinokuniya - an interesting collaboration between an academic, a newspaper and a bookstore, and if it encourages folks to read, I'm all for it.

Related Post

Great First Lines (4/2/06)

Botched Beginnings

A great first line for your story is vitally important, and some time back we shared our favourite book beginnings.

But actually bad beginnings can be much more fun! Sympozium sent me news of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest which celebrates awful writing annually. (Check out the 2006 winners.) The prize honours:

... the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of simplicity: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "pursuit of the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night." The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.

Here are some of the best from past years which clearly tickled Sympozium's funny-bone:

The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails--not for the first time since the journey began--pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.
--Gail Cain, San Francisco, California (1983 Winner)

The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarous tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong, clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, "Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my steel through your last meal."
--Steven Garman, Pensacola, Florida (1984 Winner)

The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakably--the first of many such advances during what would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career.
--Martha Simpson, Glastonbury, Connecticut (1985 Winner)

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.
--Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York (1986 Winner)

The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically peddling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by Nature's maxim, "Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work," and at last I knew Pittsburgh.
--Sheila B. Richter, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1987 Winner)

Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven--fueled by a single accelerant--and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.
--Rachel E. Sheeley, Williamsburg, Indiana (1988 Winner)

Professor Frobisher couldn't believe he had missed seeing it for so long--it was, after all, right there under his nose--but in all his years of research into the intricate and mysterious ways of the universe, he had never noticed that the freckles on his upper lip, just below and to the left of the nostril, partially hidden until now by a hairy mole he had just removed a week before, exactly matched the pattern of the stars in the Pleides, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova.
--Ray C. Gainey, Indianapolis, Indiana (1989 Winner)

Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.
--Linda Vernon, Newark, California (1990 Winner)

Sultry it was and humid, but no whisper of air caused the plump, laden spears of golden grain to nod their burdened heads as they unheedingly awaited the cyclic rape of their gleaming treasure, while overhead the burning orb of luminescence ascended its ever-upward path toward a sweltering celestial apex, for although it is not in Kansas that our story takes place, it looks godawful like it.
--Judy Frazier, Lathrop, Missouri (1991 Winner)

As the newest Lady Turnpot descended into the kitchen wrapped only in her celery-green dressing gown, her creamy bosom rising and falling like a temperamental souffle, her tart mouth pursed in distaste, the sous-chef whispered to the scullery boy, "I don't know what to make of her."
--Laurel Fortuner, Montendre, France (1992 Winner)

She wasn't really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a
tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.
--Wm. W. "Buddy" Ocheltree, Port Townsend, Washington (1993 Winner)

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.
--Larry Brill, Austin, Texas (1994 Winner)

Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy's girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, "Hold the spumoni--I'm going to follow the chick an' catch a Tory."
--John L. Ashman, Houston, Texas (1995 Winner)

"Ace, watch your head!" hissed Wanda urgently, yet somehow provocatively, through red, full, sensuous lips, but he couldn't you know, since nobody can actually watch more than part of his nose or a little cheek or lips if he really tries, but he appreciated her warning.
--Janice Estey, Aspen, Colorado (1996 Winner)

The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire contents of the bottle, thus ending her life.
-- Artie Kalemeris, Fairfax, Virginia (1997 Winner)

The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.
--Bob Perry, Milton, Massachusetts (1998 Winner)

Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life.
--Dr. David Chuter, Kingston, Surrey, ENGLAND(1999 Winner)

The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land's end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.
--Gary Dahl, Los Gatos, CA (2000 Winner)

A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur comprised of angry yapping bullets that nipped at Desdemona's ankles, causing her to reflect once again (as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.
Sera Kirk, Vancouver, BC (2001 Winner)

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002 Winner)

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you
believe it does by coloring it differently.
Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, AL (2003 Winner)

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.
Dave Zobel, Manhattan Beach, CA (2004 Winner)

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.
Dan McKay, Fargo, ND (2005 Winner)

(Notice I used purple text for purple prose!)

Sympozium adds this one of his own:

"The Director of the library said, "Our new roof costs RM5 million, but I don't know how much we spent on books. But a roof OVER our heads is more important than what's IN our heads." :-)))

Great First Lines

Saras said that she'd once been told on a creative writing course that the first line of a story should make you spill your coffee. Whilst not actually wanting to get my books any more messed up with food and drink than they already are, I have to agree that a whole lot of promise has to be coiled up in those first few words.

A sort of meme thing about best first lines seems to be being passed around among litbloggers : Edward Champion (whom I found via this post on the subject by Bud Parr) seems to be the guy who kicked off the challenge in his search for:

... an opening sentence so utterly irresistible, something that is so unquestionably curious and so absolutely tantalizing that you, as a reader, simply must read the whole thing!

And I, of course, am only too happy to pass the challenge on to you!

I think my favourite has to be the opening of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and remember the pleasure with which I settled down to read it:

Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours.

The opening line of marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is another classic:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

And then there's the audacity of Burgess in Earthly Powers :

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

I love too the way that Katherine Mansfield begins some of her short stories as if she's picking up the threads of an earlier conversation, so that you feel invited into a confidence, which is a pretty neat trick, if you think about it. The Garden Party for example begins:

And after all the weather was ideal.

Etgar Keret's short short stories have irresistible first lines and this I think is a big part of the joy of reading him:

That night when the daemon came to take away his talent, he didn't whine or argue or put up a fuss. (From One Last story and That's It)

In Hell, they put me in a cauldron of boiling water. (From Katzenstein)

In June, after the plague of frogs, people began leaving the valley in droves. (From Plague of the Firstborn)

Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll. (Breaking the Pig)

If you want to waste some serious time here's a fun literary quiz about first lines, try this. (I scored 44 out of 66 which I don't think is too bad since most of it was guesswork!) And if you want even more, the American Book Review lists 100 Best First Lines from Novels here.

Bud Parr points out, this pondering on favourite first lines is more than a little dangerous:

I find myself thinking about the great books I've read, thumbing through them, trying to resist dropping everything to re-read them. Should I pop open a bottle of wine?

In my case I'm suddenly overcome with a terrible sadness for books once owned but lost along the way. Gaps in my collection that need to be filled.