{"id":166,"date":"2016-07-02T19:46:26","date_gmt":"2016-07-02T19:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=166"},"modified":"2020-08-15T17:39:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T17:39:00","slug":"sunday-writing-practice-and-theory-of-first-sentences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=166","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Writing: Practice and Theory of First Sentences"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"beginning\"In May I wrote about story beginnings<\/a>, but that’s a bigger topic than what I wanted to focus on today: the first sentence.<\/p>\n

I’ve been working on a unified field theory for fiction, which is an impossible task. In every way the impossibility is clear when I take on the theory and practice of first sentences. A first sentence has so many possibilities! It’s supposed to hook the reader, of course (or at least not drive the reader away), but it also can introduce one or more of the following: conflict, character, setting, background, or action. It can start the story in the middle, in media res<\/i>, or it can start at the end, the beginning, or way before the beginning. In a flashback story, the first sentence could start way after the end.<\/p>\n

For me, the first sentence has to do three things: hook the reader, set the tone, and set up the end. Here’s one of my own favorite first sentences.\u00a0 It’s from “Shark Attack: a Love Story”<\/p>\n

“Willard was day dreaming about Elsa when the shark caught Benford, the new mail boy, directly in front of Willard’s desk.”
\nI liked this one because I got the two most important elements in the story within it: Willard’s attraction to Elsa, and the problem with the sharks. It seems like a good hook to me, it went a long way toward establishing the story’s tone, and it connected to the end, since the resolution of the story deals with both the sharks and Elsa.<\/p>\n

But the problem with beginning sentences is that there’s an infinite number of ways to start!\u00a0 Consider a story like a chess game.\u00a0 In chess there are 20 possible opening moves, each one affecting how the game may go.\u00a0 In a story, though, there are as many opening moves as there are words in the dictionary (isn’t it sad, then, how many stories start with “the”).<\/p>\n

So, since there are so many ways to start, and any one of them could be the first sentence to a successful story, what should be considered when evaluating the sentence?<\/p>\n

When I’m teaching story writing, I’ll often have the students put their draft’s first sentence on the board.\u00a0 I’ll have them do two things: they have to identify what approach the sentence took (conflict, character, setting, background, or action), and then decide which sentence made them want to read more the most.\u00a0 All the exercise really does is make them aware that their first sentence is a choice.\u00a0 I’m constantly amazed by inexperienced writers’ inabilty to see the malleability of their own writing.\u00a0 It’s like they are trapped by their styles!<\/p>\n

I end up giving students three pieces of advice about first sentences (and that’s all I’ve got for them–there’s too much involved for me to go beyond these suggestions):<\/p>\n