Everyday Canvas

Opening Lines, Paragraphs, and Scenes

Prompt:
"There are no rules for what constitutes a great opening, there are no rules regarding what type of opening works best.
An opening can do any of the following, set the scene, create mood, introduce characters, introduce situations, establish place and time or introduce conflict" .~ Jack Heffron

Give me an example of great openings that appeal to you from one of your favorite authors. What qualities do you notice as you think about your favorite openings?

=====================

There is no right or wrong way of writing an opening, but each generation of writers come to expect to do the opening of their fiction in a certain way, a different way. This expectation not only goes for openings but also for all areas of fiction. In one of the Writer’s Digest blogs, it writes on top of the page: There are no rules.
http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules

This is absolutely true because rules change from generation to generation, and the same is true for openings, endings, story structure, author intrusion, etc.


My personal preference for opening lines and paragraphs more or less coincides with what is popular in our time. I like openings that either introduce the story or give a one or two-sentence idea of it. The livelier the opening, the better it is for me. In other words, I like openings that either have meaningful dialogue or interesting action in them.

Take One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” He has almost the entire novel in a nutshell.

In Jojo Moyes’s 2014 novel, One Plus One, I like the energy of the opening paragraph a lot. It pulls the reader right into the action. “Ed Nicholls was in the creatives’ room drinking coffee with Ronan when Sidney walked in. A man he vaguely recognized stood behind him, another of the Suits.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Sidney said.
“Well, you found us,” Ed said.
“Not Ronan, you.”

As to opening scenes, their primary goal has to be to make the reader want to read the next scene. For that: they need enticing hooks; they ground the reader in the main character’s perspective; they may have a complete arc but they also urge the reader to what happens next; they may suggest or contain the end of the story.

Haruki Murakami’s opening scene In The Wind-Up bird Chronicle, he introduces the reader to his first person viewpoint, music, and pasta. There are other things in the background also as the narrator talks on the phone.

“When the phone rang, I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta…

“‘Ten minutes, please,’ said a woman on the other end.
I’m good at recognizing other people’s voices, but this was not one I knew.
‘’Excuse me? To whom did you wish to speak?’
‘’To you, of course. Ten minutes please. That’s all we need to understand each other.'”

The main idea is to remember that opening lines, paragraphs, and scenes are the first things readers will see. How the writer writes it will guarantee reader enthusiasm…or tragically not.

------------------------

My article (an old one) : "Fiction: Exercises in Various Beginnings"