 Short Stories: January 30, 2008 Issue [#2198] |
  Short Stories
This week: Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
-Edward Bulwer-Lytton;
Paul Clifford, 1830 |
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Dark and Stormy Nights
Reach out and grab your readers! Don't just guide them into your story - throw them head-first into the action!
It's me again: your friendly neighborhood Guest Editor! My last Short Stories newsletter covered such important technicalities as spelling, grammar and punctuation; it generated so many positive comments (see below) that I thought I'd press my luck and try covering a different topic: Opening Lines; or, When Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation Alone Just Won't Cut It.
So, you've polished up your punctuation, geared up your grammar and spiffed up your spelling - great! But now, you want to not only impress readers with your technical skills, but make them desire to read your story - instead of wandering off to be distracted by the millions of other things clamoring for their time, like watching the latest American Idol or searching for humorous edits of Wikipedia. To do this, you have to make them want to keep reading. Sure, your friends have read it, and maybe you've gotten some nice reviews - but as often as not, we read here because we're asked to, or because we've promised some reviews, or because we feel obligated. Hone your opening line; sharpen it to a keen edge that draws and holds interest, and people will be pulled in. The rest of the story must hold interest as well, but no one will get that far if you have a weak opening.
The quote in the "About" section above has long passed through cliché and stereotype; it's now entered the hallowed halls of archetype - it is the archetype of how not to start a story.
Consider the opening paragraph of Steven Brust's novel, To Reign in Hell:
Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.
I think Brust gets away with it only because the sentence is self-aware. But most of us can't slip such excesses past an editor.
So, what is wrong with "It was a dark and stormy night...?"
Let's begin with the opening word: It. It is a third-person singular pronoun. As a pronoun, it must have an antecedent. But wait - it has no antecedent, because it's the first word in the story! To what does "It" refer? Reading on, we discover that it refers to "night." Perfectly fine in speech, as in "It's going to rain," but a lousy start to a story (and don't quote Dickens at me. A Tale of Two Cities is widely regarded as a paragon of English literature in spite of, not because of, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...")
So much for "It." Don't start your story with "It." You might be able to get away with using just about any other pronoun, most notably the first person pronouns, but avoid "It."
Second word: "was." Irregular linking verb. Conveys... nothing. That's right. "Was" is a meaningless word, as is "is." Some languages skip these verbs entirely. Other languages incorporate them into one of the nouns. You might say, "Well, it conveys past tense." But that's meaningless, too, as the vast majority of writing is done in the past tense. "The past is read as the present," a teacher once told me. When you write in present tense, it's visible to the readers; but write in past tense, and it becomes invisible, just part of the story. The only purpose of "was" is to associate one thing (in this case, "night," which, I repeat, we don't find out until later) with its adjectives (in this case, "a," "dark," and "stormy," which, again, we don't find out until later.)
"It was." That's a perfectly good sentence right there, by itself: it has a subject and a verb. However, it is without meaning. It lacks action; "was" is a state of being, not an action. It lacks imagery. It lacks interest. "It was" no way to start a story.
Now, let's examine the adjectives. "a" is an indefinite article; like "was," it's meaningless; again, many languages lack articles such as this, relying on context to distinguish "a(n)" from "the." Three words into the opening of the story, and what do we have? Linguistically, nothing.
Next adjective: "dark." Hey, now we're getting somewhere, right? "Dark" describes something: the level of light; to wit, low. That is, until you get to "night," when you realize that the author just said night was dark. That's like saying the sun is bright, or a sheet of notebook paper is white: these are adjectives that only apply when the reader might have some reason to suspect they might not. "It was a dark night" tells us only one thing: that we begin our story at night.
Final adjective: "stormy." (I'm glossing over the word "and," with sure knowledge that my readers have already come to the conclusion that this conjunction is even more useless than any of the other words we've been discussing.) Okay, now we really are getting somewhere! There's a storm! But wait: what's the storm doing? Rain? Lightning? Snow? Wind? We don't find out until after the semicolon. Well, I guess "stormy" isn't all that great, then. Too broad.
And then, finally, at the end of that first complete phrase: "night." At least we have some time frame for the darkness and storminess!
That said, the image of the "flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness" is, in my opinion, pretty powerful: real, concrete imagery with personification. It's too bad we have to slog through four dozen other words (and a parenthetical phrase) to get to it!
To summarize:
 The opening lines should grab the reader's attention.
To do so, avoid linking verbs and pronouns of disputable antecedent.
Also, avoid unnecessary words, especially adjectives and adverbs.
When possible, begin with action and include an element of mystery.
One of my favorite opening lines? Robert A. Heinlein began his 1982 novel Friday with:
As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door contracted behind him I killed him.
But doesn't that break my rule about pronouns with disputable antecedents? And isn't the first sentence's main verb "was?" More, aren't there commas missing? Why, yes. But it works. It sets it up as science fiction from the very beginning by talking about beanstalk capsules and contracting doors; it introduces an element of mystery by not naming who "he" is, and gives us a hint of the action that's sure to follow. What it lacks in description, it makes up for in mystery, suspense and action.
One more example, before I leave you: Stephen King, from The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
That made me want to read on, which led to my purchase of all seven volumes of The Dark Tower. Now, that's effective. |
In stumbling around on the site, I found some stories whose opening lines led me to want more:
Chase's slim fingers ran over the cordless phone's number pad in the dark, dialing at random. What was Abby's cell number? He knew it began with 73...736? He wasn't sure. So far, nothing.
Far across the golden savannah the horizon lifted its yellow head and opened its mouth. The roar could be heard for miles around. A grey rock in a river located miles away opened its mouth in return and let out a joyful grunt.
Only one beast on Earth did this, Vince Miles told his writhing innards. Crosses, silver bullets, crystal amulets—all beyond the pale of this particular fetish; certainly so, considering the way it chose to flay the victim’s body over the Venetian tiles.
The white hot lights shone as the crowd stared at me on the tiny stage; someone was fussing around with my hair while another put some powder on my face with an oversized makeup brush. Everything seemed so much smaller and less glamorous in person, and the giant coffee cup placed in front of me with the show’s logo on it didn’t even have anything in it. The man behind the camera put his hand up with five fingers in the air; the makeup and hair people scurried, four fingers, three; the show’s band started to play a couple of bars of music, two, one.
{i]Edison sits still with one elbow on the table and the side of his face mashed into his hand. The wait staff dances around him like ballerinas with trays held slightly above their shoulders and the scent of Thai food escaping into the air. He takes notice of their navigation, their balance, their grace. He takes notice of the Thai aroma homogenizing with the light fragrance of dandelion exuding from the centerpiece.
They say she plants herself on a rock in the middle of the Rhine and calls men to their doom with her irresistible song. You've heard of the Lorelei, right? An enchanting creature with long, golden hair and a golden comb to match? She sings in her golden voice and sailors steer their boats right over a cliff. You may think it's just fairy-tale fluff, but I'm a witness to her misdeeds. She killed my husband.
“Scooba, behave yourself! Let go of Minna right now!” Seeing another of my cats being sucked into my robot’s water tank had me yelling from the far side of the wet kitchen floor. Only yesterday, when Scooba was washing the library floor, the small robot seemed to aim at any cat that dared to enter the room. My kitten, tiny Xanadu, thought she’d found a new toy until it caught her tail in the rotating brush and slowly, ever so slowly, drew the screaming feline inside for the bath of her life.
In spite of her name, Sweetie Mae Brown was the meanest woman in Sugar Shack, Mississippi. She was big as a linebacker. She once picked Scooter Davis, who was six feet tall and two hundred pounds, up by the back of his neck like a mother cat would do to one of her kittens, and tossed him off her porch. She had beaten up on her last three husbands and was currently scouting for number four.
“Sometimes, I swear that it’s looking at me,” 85762358 said, leaning one wooden hand on his abdomen.
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The last time I was here, I wrote about the importance of grammar. That newsletter received too many comments to list them all; I'm including a limited set here.
ftrinta: Thanks for this newsletter. I always have some problems regarding phrase construction as English is not my first language. Grammar and ponctuation are not the hard ones for me as you can always learn.
Writing in this site has helped me not only to grow in my writing but also helped me to grow in my English as well. I really appreciate all the readers and writers around here that have helped me to polish my stories on this matter!
I sometimes forget, when writing these editorials, that the readership includes a large number of people for whom English is not a first language. Rules of grammar and sentence construction in one language don't usually translate to another; and from what I've heard, English is one of the more difficult languages to learn. Thanks for the reminder!
Seisa-sleepingcatbooks.com  : Thank you, Waltz, for reminding your readership that good grammar, spelling, and punctuation are just as important as the other aspects of writing. Nothing turns me off reading a piece more than easily-caught errors in the first paragraph (especially in a contest entry)!
I didn't cover this above, but it should go without saying that the first paragraph needs to not only hook the reader, but be grammatically immaculate! Oh, I guess I said it, anyway.
dusktildawn: I loved this Newsletter, Robert. For me personally, I will stop reading a short story or chapter if it is filled with typos. If the writer has not taken the time or effort, why should a reader? AND an editor is not to correct your mistakes. If a hopeful writer wishes to be published, rest assured that if their MS is filled with blatant mistakes and disregard to grammar rules, it goes directly into the garbage.
Rules for writing are important, and if you want people to read and enjoy what you have to say, then rules should be followed. Practice makes perfect.
Thanks for this take on it! See below for another non-native English speaker's opinion.
Mavis Moog  : Great points about why grammar, punctuation and spelling are important.
I have only one slight disagreement with you. You claim a writer doesn't need to know a dangling participle from a split infinitive. I think the words for the parts of speech are tools to help us understand how grammar works. One cannot hope to glean those finer details of style from reading alone.
Have you ever tried explaining how to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition without explaining what a preposition is? Giving a list of all the possible prepositions, and learning it, is far more difficult than learning what a preposition is.
How does one explain concord without referring to subjects and verbs?
I know you were trying to be gentle, and not scare novice writers by swamping them with technicalities; but actually, if a writer falls at that first simple hurdle, what chance is there of him battling all the other obstacles to success.
Very good point, Mavis - I was thoughtless in my phrasing. What I meant to convey was that not knowing the technical names for the rules shouldn't stop someone from beginning to write - but the writer should use every opportunity, especially given the excellent feedback system here at Writing.Com, to learn, grow, and educate himself or herself about the rules.
lethomson: I once read a great quote: If a doctor has to know his anatomy, a writer should know his grammar and conventions.
Great quote indeed! To my knowledge, few people have perished as a result of a dangling participle; however, some writers' spelling and grammar make me almost wish for the release that death would bring. Instead, I merely stop reading.
AXiLeA : Excellent newsletter subject, I agree with all the points you made.
I would also add that knowing more about grammar and syntax helps us to understand the basic rules of a language and this kind of understanding is an important step in learning foreign languages more easily and accurately.
As a translator, former teacher and novice poet, I can say that understanding grammar and syntax in my mother tongue and second language made it easier to learn English and French later in life.
I really enjoy having the choice and expressing different aspects/feelings/experiences in a different language.
I couldn't agree more. If I hadn't been drilled in Latin grammar and syntax, I wouldn't have even my incomplete grasp of the subtleties of those of English.
acappella: Eye think you're grammar and spelling are okay four now, Waltz, but isle bee keeping an I on you.
My spell checker passed every one of those words except for "okay." Go figure... Aca, I hope to see you over at my usual haunt, the Comedy newsletter!
I also want to thank the following people for sending in their positive comments: bardothodol , Acme , ⭐Princette♥PengthuluWrites  , Jaye P. Marshall  . Zeke , Vivian  , whimzician , StephBee  , faithjourney, alfred booth, wanbli ska , Arthur . Thanks for all the great feedback, and stay away from those dark and stormy nights! |
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