First Lines

The other night I woke up with a phrase running through my head. It was, “Margaret stepped across the threshold looking up at the stars.”

Last night the phrase was, “I heard the sound of a flute float across the bog.” 

BOG? I must have bogs on my mind.Maybe this blog should be called The Bogs of Fortune (see March 6)

I am not sleeping very soundly because these phrases keep running through my mind. It’s a voice, actually, reciting the phrases. I’ve noticed the voice is somewhat formal, a bit Victorian.

Do those phrases sound like the beginning of a book? At the Greenfield Middle School where I gave a presentation recently, Rob Buyea  (Because of Mr. Terupt) talked about the need for strong beginnings, the need for a hook to pull your readers in. I have been to a few writers’ retreats where they have “first page” readings. You submit a first page of a project and then it is read aloud to the group and then editors comment on the strengths or weaknesses of the first page. (You can check out this very favorable reaction to Rob Buyea’s book, Because of Mr. Terupt here: (http://theboyreader.blogspot.com/2010/10/because-of-mr-terupt-by-rob-buyea.html)

The first page determines so much. Not even the whole page, really. The first sentence. Never judge  book by its cover, only by its first sentence. 

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“I am an invisible man.” - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;t hat not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.” - Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)

One night my voice kept saying this phrase to me, over and over again: “We knew the maple tree in the courtyard had shed its leaves because it was grieving for Oswald  …” and that more or less became the opening for The Shadow Collector’s Apprentice (Holiday House 2012) I changed Oswald to Jack, which changes a lot of things, because it wasn’t an Oswald sort of story. To me, the name Oswald implies a fairy tale.  Oswald is a Germanic name, I believe, meaning “man of the woods.” An interesting woman named Fagin I met at a spa in Mexico told me this. I am not at all the spa type, although it was a pleasant experience. I gave this person the name Fagin, not because she had anything to do with pickpocketing, and I don’t know why anymore why I named her, or why I named her Fagin.

The Bags of Fortune. Rootling through the bags in our minds is what we all do as writers, bringing up this and that.