Shouts From Down Under

From beginning the writer went on until reaching the end

Can you remember the first moment of your life? Those early memories. Are they foggy edged snap-shots, blurry, sepia, unclear?

Did your life switch on, like a naked globe hanging in an empty locked room above an interrogation chair, and you found yourself suddenly alive?

What did happen? How do you know? Were you told what happened by a relative, and then you absorbed these memories so well you now feel like they are your own?

I would say we are all different in this regard. Everyone has different memories in their earliest years of varying pleasantness.

But surely nobody has the complete picture right back to birth? Surely noone remembers, like, when they were 6 months old? Ok, say there's a smarty pants genious who does. Go back then. Say 3 months old? What about only a few minutes old?

When we begin a story, does it sound like someone turned on that world? Does it read as if all the characters only just "got born" that day? I'm not just talking about their past lives and how you bring that information to the reader. I'm talking about those opening few sentences in a story, or more so a novel.

Do you try and write it as if it's like a movie beginning. Yes you have your scene, but the characters interaction, the events, the dialogue and all of it work together to create a scene that sounds like it has been there the whole time, and doesn't / didn't need some half a**ed author somewhere, to write it into being.

The story reads like it's real. A real world that always existed.

Well, I've tried to do that with my first novel, The Influence Gene, with the first words and the beginning of the first scene. You've heard of the term "fade to black?"

I've tried to reverse that, and have the story fade in from a blackout.



(picture - http://wallpoper.com/wallpaper/cityscapes-pripyat-277559)

Ukraine
Прип'ять (Pripyat)
April 26 1986

Pitch blackness reigned.
The lights flickered back on, a dull brown, gradually strengthening to stark brightness.
Though the blackout was brief; she checked the time and wearily registered that it was now Saturday.

Time: 00:02

For Anna Tymoshenko, the first moments of this day were fateful already.



How does your story begin? How does it feel? Do you, as a reader, come along during the middle of a conversation? Can you get the drift of it as if the whole thing didn't depend on you reading it? It's as if, if you didn't read the book, all those people and stuff would still happen regardless of your existence.

To me, that's an excellent story, and complete immersion in that world. Right to the end of the world, and yet it still goes on. We like to imagine it going on after that last page.

I want to strive to write every scene like that. They either sound right, or they dont.

What do you think?


Sparky