So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  For instance, if your story is about a doctor, you could use the first page to tell us how old she is and whether she went to an ivy league med school or a state school and what she chose to specialize in and whether she’s a risk taker or plays it safe; or you could begin in the middle of open heart surgery and allow the reader to discover her background while seeing her in action. You could begin the story of this doctor at her birth and move forward through medical school, to the daring new type of heart implant that won her fame around the world. You could start with the bomb that killed her as she was washing up after the operation and go back to her birth and the difficult struggle to make it to college, no less med school, coming as she did from a dirt-poor Appalachian family. You could start with her first sexual encounter with her childhood sweetheart, Malcolm, in which she insisted on retaining her virginity, having watched her mother give birth to eight children, and thereby losing Malcolm to another girl. There are as many ways to begin as there are stories, but the most important thing is that whatever beginning you choose intrigues the reader and entices them to read on.

  This does not mean that you should stare at your computer and freeze up and write nothing until you discover the perfect place to start. Never be afraid to get going on something. You can rework your beginning endless times. All writers do. You don’t have to have the perfect beginning to get to the middle—not at all. Several of my novels began at what later became chapter two. In Small Changes, I actually began with what is now Chapter Six, which goes back in time and brings Miriam from her childhood up toward where we meet her in chapter three. It was only when I had written Miriam up to where she meets Beth that I went back in first draft and started chapter one with Beth’s marriage. Both of Ira’s novels, The Kitchen Man and Going Public have as a second chapter what was originally, in early drafts, the first chapter.

  From The Kitchen Man: I am a spy at the elbow of the powerful, a fly on their wall. Ignored, I mingle, privy to the secrets they drop casually. I deliver pleasure. I loosen their tongues with champagne. And smile. And remember.

  By night, I listen. By day, I write.

  Naked, I begin the transformation.

  The jeans of my day balled in a corner, I shimmy into black wool trousers, shark skin smooth, alive with prickly static. My starched shirt crackles as I break it from its cardboard bondage, my patent leather pumps twinkle sapphires of blue light.

  Upstairs, rushing feet drub the ruby carpets, tap cadence on the marble floors. Chairs clack into place. Ice tumbles into silver buckets. Nervous voices shout last minute instructions and bitter complaints seethe, whispers in the cavernous hallways of Danish castles.

  I tug cautiously at the wings of my tie. I flick stray fuzz from the pleats of my cummerbund. Snapping my onyx cufflinks into place, I inspect my nails. I catch my waistcoat as it tips, satin cool and shimmering, from its wooden hanger. Combing my thick moustache into perfect symmetry, clicking my heels, I turn to the mirror and bow. I am perfect. I am ready. I am a soldier in the service of the appetites of the rich. A waiter at Les Neiges D’Antan.

  The Snows of Yesterday. The finest restaurant north of New York City. Number one choice in the haute cuisine category of every magazine in which we advertise.

  Until fifth draft, Gone to Soldiers began with what is now chapter four. The decision where to begin is extremely critical and often subject to much experimentation. There are two different versions of F. Scott Fiztgerald’s novel Tender is the Night, as I recall, one in Rosemary’s viewpoint and one in Dick’s.

  I can give you three rules which, if not golden, are certainly useful: Do not confuse the Beginning of the Story with the beginning of the events in the story. There is infinite regression in all stories, or they would all begin with the Big Bang when the universe started. The particular events you are shaping may start with the birth of your character, but that is not where the Story starts.

  Second, never confuse the Beginning of the Story with how you begin to write it. In hindsight, there is usually a correct place to begin in the plot, but in your own work, begin writing where you can. Sometimes if you are having trouble entering a character, you can find a scene you can imagine yourself in, a point of commonalty, of empathy, where you can make a doorway into that character. Perhaps it is a piece of your own life. That might be the first scene you write, even if it turns out to be in the middle or even at the end of the finished product.

  Third, no matter how cute or compelling or chic or gripping your beginning may be, if it does not lead to your story, be prepared to scrap it rather than distorting the entire book in the service of a good start. I knew a writer who won two awards on the strength of the first chapter to a novel, from which the novel not only did not but could not follow. But she could never abandon that chapter, because it was the strongest part of the book. It was arresting, all right, but all the fireworks were burned out by the end of it and it could not develop into the material she really had for a novel. Therefore, while the material paid off financially for a while, she never got a novel, never got more than a couple of excerpts published and never got on with her writing.

  Even more to the point, if the rest of the book does not follow from the beginning, you will draw readers who will be disappointed. They thought it was blood and guts, but it’s a tender psychological study of a boy who loves a pigeon; they thought it was going to be a humorous trip through contemporary adolescence, but it is a psychopath’s revenge. The beginning must be powerful or inviting, and it must begin what you are actually going to continue.

  If you are working with multiple viewpoints in a novel, it is worth serious consideration which character should open your book. Sometimes it is a matter of chronology, sometimes of opening with the most intriguing or inviting character. There is no reason it should be the most important, unless that’s a great idea for other reasons. Since I use multiple viewpoints a great deal, I often shuffle my early chapters until I find the best arrangement. The beginning is that important: it is all important. Without a good beginning, no one with the possible exception of your mother or partner will ever bother to continue reading what you have written.

  Don’t be afraid to start in the middle of things. If you’re telling the story of a life, you do not have to start with childhood. Yes, someone’s life starts with her birth, of course; but that doesn’t have to be where your story starts. Does your story begin with your birth? With your parents’ births or marriage? With your graduation or meeting your life partner? Does it start with a discovery or the desire to understand something puzzling, to solve a mystery or to change your life in some way?

  From Rookie Cop by Richard Rosenthal:Sol Hurok immigrated to the United States from the village of Pogar, Russia in 1906 and made a small living for himself by producing concerts for New York City’s ever growing number of labor societies. Over the years, the workers’ craving for highbrow entertainment grew to such an extent that his concerts were staged in the Hippodrome, an enormous amusement hall built by P.T. Barnum. Hurok became the personal manager of the great Afro-American contralto Marian Anderson and arranged the first U.S. tour for the young violin sensation and son of a poor Israeli barber, Itzak Perlman. Within several generations, Hurok became known as The Impresario, importing cultural institutions such as the Comédie Francaise and the Old Vic to perform for American audiences. A more beneficial, or benign profession would be hard to imagine. Except that the talent he imported also included the Bolshoi Ballet and the Moiseyev Dance Company and there were those who wished to disrupt the ties between the United States and the then-Soviet Union—by any means necessary.

  Hurok had been warned many times that he was to stop bringing in Soviet performers. Bottles of ammonia had been uncorked during a number of his events as well as during shows produced by Columbia Artists, a rival company that also imported Russian talent. Live mice and stink bombs had been used to cause upset to the audiences. Some performances had been disrupted by shouting. Annoying as those actions might
have been, they hadn’t proven effective enough. It was thought that perhaps smoke bombs, delivered right to Hurok’s office, as well as those of Columbia Artists, would make the point.

  A young man was given some money to buy the chemicals (hypnole and an oxygenator) in order to produce the devices. Although an effective smoke bomb needed only a few ounces of the two materials when combined, he purchased a hundred pounds of the stuff, the reasoning being, if a little smoke was good, a lot of smoke would be better. Then he and another fellow made up two bombs, each weighing thirteen pounds and placed them inside two cheap attaché cases, a small fuse jutting inconspicuously outside each, ready for the match.

  This memoir does not even begin with the author, the protagonist, but with the beginning of a critical situation in his undercover work. We meet him after we have a notion of what kind of situation he had been plunged into. He is using a bombing—which will lead to a death—to bring us into the story of an episode in his life when, as a rookie cop in the New York City Police Department, he was sent undercover, without training, to infiltrate an organization that had just come to the notice of the Bureau of Special Investigations, the Jewish Defense League.

  Some characters in fiction or some people writing their memoirs may have had a fascinating childhood that should be covered in depth. For other characters or for yourself, you may want to whip though childhood in a few paragraphs or pages or tell significant bits and pieces of it on the fly. In the memoir Rookie Cop, the author mentions his childhood only briefly, well into the narrative, and only to explain why he chose to enter the police department. The same holds true if your novel or story is about a particular incident. You can start in the middle of World War II and go back to its beginning, to when your main character was drafted. You can start in the middle of a safari, as Hemingway did in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” when the main character has just committed what he believes is an act of cowardice, fill in the beginning of the story through conversation and move to the end, where his wife blows his head off with a 6.5 Mannlicher rifle.

  You have to decide your best way to open. Maybe it’s an event, a marriage or ceremony where your main characters are all assembled. Dorothy Allison in her novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, puts all the important characters, the women in her family, inside a speeding car with the implication that something important is about to happen and with a strong sense of the social class and regional flavor of the characters. Maybe you want to start with a moment of revelation, when everything that came before it comes suddenly into perspective and everything afterwards is seen through an enlightened perspective. Maybe your story starts with a moment of outrageous good fortune, the birth of a child; or a moment of torment, such as the death of one. Maybe it starts with a strange coincidence: seeing an old lover again after ten years or overhearing a phone call that terrifies or enlightens you.

  You might start with a general statement about yourself that you hope will generate curiosity or empathy or identification in your reader. This is the opening of my memoir, Sleeping with Cats:Do I have faith in my memory? Who doesn’t? How can I not trust memory? It is as if I were to develop a mistrust for my right hand or my left foot. Yet I am quite aware that my memory is far from perfect. I frequently forget events and people that my husband Ira Wood remembers, and similarly, I remember incidents that have slipped away from him. I rarely remember things incorrectly; mostly I remember clearly or I forget completely.

  I have distinct memories of events that happened before I was born or for which I was not present. This comes from having heard the stories told vividly by my mother or my grandmother when I was little and imagining those scenes and the people in them so clearly and intensely that I experience them as my own. I have precise memories of the voice and face of my mother’s father, who died ten years before my birth. Stories about him that I heard as a child were so real to me that I created him as a living personage.

  In our experience, the best way to learn how to write good beginnings is to read what others have written and discover how they solved the same problems you will face. Don’t worry about imitating what they’ve written because your vision, your plot, your characters will be unique to your story. Nor should you worry about liking every beginning you read. You can learn as much from writing that you consider to be dreadful as you can from the pieces you admire.

  There are a number of books on writing that emphasize the necessity of starting with a snappy first sentence. We are more concerned with the situation you choose to begin with, and the way various writers have solved the problem of attempting to hook the reader.

  Gore Vidal begins his memoir, Palimpsest, with the wedding of two members of high society in “the church of the presidents” across the avenue from the White House, where he was one of the ushers, JFK was another, and Jackie Kennedy went off to the bathroom with the bride and showed her how to douche, post-sex. Name-dropping, the hint of scandal, the promise of gossip and the insider’s view of the lives of the rich and famous, are Vidal’s hooks.

  In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos attempts to seduce his readers with nostalgia as he evokes the kind of inner city neighborhood few of us live in anymore. On LaSalle Street, in Brooklyn in the 1950s, kids play in the courtyard as mothers doing housework watch from their windows, everybody’s kids, not only their own. Mrs. Shannon, the Irish lady “in her perpetually soup-stained dress” calls out to Cesar to tell him his favorite episode of I Love Lucy is on, the one in which his father and uncle appeared as Cuban cousins of Desi Arnaz at the Tropicana nightclub. Most readers have heard of I Love Lucy; many would be intrigued by a young kid whose relatives were somehow attached to the show.

  Piri Thomas starts his autobiographical collection of short stories set in prison, Seven Long Times, during a stick-up in a bar. He recounts the role every member of his gang had played many times before; where each man positioned himself and how they silently signaled each other, how they herded the customers against the wall and approached the bartender. But this time something goes hopelessly wrong. Curious?

  Lillian Hellman begins her memoir, Pentimento, one foggy summer morning on Martha’s Vineyard when, during an ordinary swim, she is sucked under by a sudden riptide and almost drowns. She bashes her head against the pilings of a pier and, thinking she is about to die, imagines herself in a conversation with her former lover Dashiell Hammet, “a man who had been dead five years.”

  Simone deBeauvoir decides to start Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter on the day she was born. Turning the pages of a picture album, describing photographs of her proper French family, she risks losing many readers who would be fascinated with her courageous and unorthodox life but bored by an ordinary bourgeois childhood until, describing her relationship to her little sister, she proves herself to be anything but an ordinary child. “I felt myself to be much more interesting than an infant bundled up in a cradle. I had a little sister; that doll-like creature didn’t have me.”

  Cesare Casella (with Eileen Daspin) tells the story of his life in in a cookbook entitled Diary of a Tuscan Chef. Family experiences are intermingled with recipes in this memoir and in the first chapter he posits that he doesn’t exactly know where he was conceived but if he had to guess, he’d say the kitchen, and goes on to describe, in delicious sensual detail, the room, the region and the people that so influenced his life. Anyone who hungers for “dusty rounds of pecorino put up for the winter, tins of salted anchovies to eat with bread ... and liters upon liters of vino delle colline Lucchesi” cannot fail to be seduced.

  William Gibson begins his cyber-punk novel Count Zero with his hero Turner being chased through the ghettos of India by an intelligent bomb called a Slamhound filled with “a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.” What’s a Slamhound exactly? Why is it chasing him? Is there such a thing as recrystallized hexogene? Who cares? Turner is blown to bits and it takes three months to put him together again, with eyes and genitals bought on the open marke
t. It’s the speed, the violence, the absurd details of the author’s future world that keep the reader wondering, What the hell is going on?

  There are beginnings that seduce simply by creating an identification between the readers and characters. In the short story “Storm,” Edna O’Brien begins with a mother, a son and his fiancée on summer holiday together. We are drawn into the mother’s thorough observation and growing jealousy of their relationship, and her admission that watching these young lovers makes her feel old. Mary Flanagan begins her story, “Cream Sauce,” with Lydia, the world’s slowest cook. Lydia likes to drink Bordeaux as she prepares dinner, while her suffering family is enticed by “tantalizing aromas accompanied by interminable waits” likely to be followed by “not infrequent failures which must, out of sheer physical necessity, be consumed.” Anybody who cooks, or lives with a cook like Lydia, would read on.

  Creating An Irresistible Beginning

  The decision about exactly what should be on page one of your novel or memoir is extremely critical, so don’t hesitate to experiment. In our workshops, our first assignment is to write a dynamite beginning. The catch is, it doesn’t have to be the beginning of anything you plan to finish or even to write. The goal is simply a beginning that is irresistible, that when read aloud (we ask the participants to write one page only) those hearing it will demand to know what happens next.

  When we give this assignment on the first night of the workshop, people always groan. “An irresistible beginning? You’re cruel! We can’t do that!” They start to tense up, at which point Ira always tells the following story: