Absolute Gentleman

I had never heard of Noy Holland before the conference at UMASS, and didn’t know that it was, in fact, she who inadvertently flicked (flicked?) tossed her long blonde hair behind her, draping it onto my bare knees during the Bachelder/Davis conversation.

As a participant in the conference, I chose to attend certain “craft sessions” before arriving. I don’t remember choosing Holland’s, and I don’t think I would have, considering it dealt with first lines in fiction. But like always, I was skeptical, then surprised about its usefulness. She started out by saying:

“If you wrote down every first line you ever created, what would it say about your tendencies…”

This isn’t a direct quote, even though I made it look like it, but you get the idea. Here are some of my first lines.

When it wasn’t enough to watch Superfly Snuka soar from the top rope, or watch Mad Dog Vachon slap a sleeper hold on a dazed and disoriented patsy, we created our own neighborhood wrestling league on our little piece of Long Island.

We used to hang out at a bar called The Melrose.

This is the only photograph I have of Erin.

I don’t tell many people that I was nineteen before I had sex for the first time.

Today I’m in my son’s room before I leave for work, knelt over one of his open dresser drawers, looking for a fashionable outfit so I can dress him.

The one thing I have always wanted to avoid is fashioning opening lines just to be clever or varied. The best first lines I probably ever crafted were ones I never intended to be first lines. I used to attend a writers’ group with a woman who was brilliant at advising where a story should start, based on the text I had already written. There’s a person like this in every writers’ group. It’s the easiest comment to make without actually analyzing the writing. This woman, though, was really good.

So what do my first lines say about my sensibilities as a writer?

• I write almost exclusively in the first person.
• My first lines break into a conversation of sorts with the reader. This goes along with the voice I’ve developed and my philosophy that my writing is at its best when I write as if I’m telling a story to someone.
• In terms of what the lines do, it seems to vary. I’m foreshadowing action in some, while in others I introduce a setting…
• I like to think my sentences are varied in length naturally.

Holland had us examine some of Joy Williams’ first lines, and I find them to be similar to the approach my students take when they write their first stories. The first lines work, but they seem to be too easy, or too basic in how it interacts with the reader. Take this first line from Joy Williams’ story, “Marabou”:

The funeral of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly.

I’m giving Williams the benefit of the doubt because she’s widely admired, but I don’t agree with how I perceive she’s treating her readers here. It’s as if she expected a new set of readers to take her work on, and she’s employing very basic strategies to rope them in. Maybe I’m making too much of it, but I would not have chosen this line as representative of a good first line. Here’s another, from her short story “Honored Guest”:

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.

Here’s another example of what I perceive as writing to a new audience. This feels like the start of a story for new teenage readers, and it has little to do with the reference to eleventh grade. If the sentence stopped at the end of the first independent clause, it would have the feel of the first example. When Williams added the rest of it, it felt like that bouncy kind of voice, despite the subject matter, that you get in young adult novels. Am I wrong?

On some level, probably. Holland didn’t present this craft talk to show us how to start our stories, but to survey the ways good writers have started their stories. Her handout was a two-pager that included about forty first sentences, all organized according to categories she created. It was an interesting read. I’ll fax you a copy if you want to see what she did.

Noy Holland opened a discussion on the first lines of poetry, and one of the participants said that she measures the value of a poem, or buys a collection of poetry, based on what she thinks of the last lines of each poem. This fascinated me even more when Holland reacted as if it were common knowledge.

So I guess it’s the first five pages of the novel, the first line or paragraph of the short story, and the last line of the poem.

Some other little paraphrased fascinations of note during her session

A story should occur within itself rather than be dependent on continually added events on the end of each plot point. This could be the major difference between literary fiction and genre fiction. If genre fiction is dependent on plot twist and turns and the next thing happening, literary fiction is partly dependent on being contemplative about the specific plot points. For example, I would label my story, “Keys” as literary because it takes a very simple plot and constantly analyzes it.

On strength versus reservation: Writing a good story, or a good section of a story, is like great singing in an opera. A huge reserve of power releases itself in a controlled fashion through a small opening. I’m obviously paraphrasing, but I love this concept. There has to be an incredible amount of power behind the words, but the words have to be used precisely and in a controlled way.