The Short Story: First Impressions

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Adrea Kore, Creative Process, Developmental Editing, editing fiction, Metaphor, On Writing, short story

 “To begin at the beginning.”

Under Milkwood Theatre Poster – Clwyd Theatr Cymrd

With this beckoning sentence, Welsh author and playwright Dylan Thomas opens his renowned and much-performed radio play Under Milkwood.

The narrator speaks here, setting the scene for a sleeping town; one “moonless night” in Spring, “starless and bible-black.” Most famously narrated by the resonant, deep tones of actor Richard Burton, the words bid the listeners to pay attention. Here comes a story. The alliteration and repetition already draws us in. For those of us with Christian backgrounds, the words echo the very first sentence of one of our oldest and most epic of stories: the Bible.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

We teeter on that first sentence with the narrator, waiting to step down into the rolling, seething, ribald psyche of the sleeping townspeople; to creep into their cellars, be voyeurs of their wet dreams and illicit affairs, their silent sorrows and repressed desires.

Begin at the beginning …

Described by Thomas as a “play for voices”, Under Milkwood has been produced many times worldwide for radio and stage. I was cast as narrator for a stage adaptation in my first year of drama school, and the opening lines always stayed with me. The play’s language and imagery is rich, visceral and poetic, alive with alliteration and metaphor, onopatopoeia and intoxicating rhythms. For those interested in language, I’d argue the play-text reads just as well as a short story. Vividly realised through both narration and brilliant dialogue, the characters of Llareggubb Hill leap off the page and into your imagination.

A compelling short story ideally can and should make use of the elements I’ve highlighted in Under Milkwood to achieve the same intensity of resonance in the reader’s imagination: opening, imagery, language, characterization and dialogue.

For this post, it feels appropriate “to begin at the beginning”, to focus on first impressions: title, the first sentence and the opening paragraph.

A brief aside: all of these elements are also important in longer-form fiction. Additionally, I’d underline the importance of the entire first chapter to lay the foundations of the story and capture the reader’s attention. But that’s another post in the making.

In a short story, you’re going to have less time with the reader than with a novel. You need to make every word, sentence, paragraph and scene count. First impressions matter.

I’ll say it again:

First impressions matter.

FIRST SENTENCE: THE ENTRY POINT FOR YOUR READER

First impressions are as important in a story as they are in a job interview or a first date. As a university student, majoring in theatre and taking literature as an elective, I studied Kafka’s polemic short story Metamorphosis. Kafka’s story begins with this intriguing first sentence:

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

How could a dull story possibly emerge from that opening premise? I had to read on. It may well have been while studying Metamorphosis that I became convinced of the vital role of the opening sentence to set the short story in motion and to coax the reader inside the story-world.

A strong short story nearly always has a riveting first sentence. A sentence that beckons, or yanks you in by the hair.

To begin at the beginning …

How do we, as writers, find the right entry-point for our story? Where is that place in the charged narrative swimming inside our minds that we can clearly signpost as its unique and compelling beginning? As we know, it’s not always, chronologically speaking, the first “beat” of the story. Some narratives are most effective when they move back and forth in space and time.

As a writer, the idea for a story often coincides with the words of the first sentence, appearing in my mind’s eyes like burning neon on my retina. Heart pumping, I race to get it down on paper, because I know it’s my ticket into my own story-cinema. If I lose it, I may lose the story, popcorn and all. Here’s one:

“Last week, she tried to leave him on a Wednesday just before dinner.”
– Wet Satin Plaything (2015)

Just like a love affair, there’s a lot of heat in the imaginations’ first encounter with a new story. Other times, when I don’t get the first line, I draft out the story in chunks – whatever is coming to me. Then as it starts to take shape, I pull out my magnifying glass, and go hunting for that first line. It’s often buried somewhere in the body of the draft.

Some writers may relate to this. If you’re not excited when you read the first line of your story, chances are your readers won’t be either. Keep an open mind, and go hunting. Oftentimes, you’ve written it already – you just have to pull it out of the pile of words, set it on top of the page, and give it a polish.

Time for an eccentric writerly confession: I collect first lines of stories. I have notebooks full of them. For this post, I decided to re-visit some of my most beloved short story writers, and pull out some first-rate first sentences.

Let’s begin with the writer who made me truly want to be a writer, and precipitated my love for word-play and images: Ray Bradbury. If you haven’t read him, and you claim to love short stories, please stop what you are doing and go find some of his stories. Now. Start with The Martian Chronicles if you like science-fiction, or The Illustrated Man if strange tales with dark carnival themes appeal.

My well-read collections of Bradbury short stories

“He came out of the earth, hating.”
Pillar of Fire

“The rocket metal cooled in the meadow winds.”
Dark they Were, and Golden-Eyed

“The city waited twenty thousand years.”
The City

All of these first sentences, short as they are, feature important players in the story, and invoke the particular story-world. A man who should be dead, walks and feels again. A rocket has just landed – “cooled” being a telling verb. Where, we wonder, and who will come out? A city is a protagonist. It exists: has memory, a consciousness and a tenacious patience, and something is finally going to happen.

The first example also establishes one of the driving emotions of the story: hate.

Below are some other first sentences, by authors I have long read and admired:

“My father lost me to the Beast at cards.”
The Tiger’s Bride, Angela Carter (from The Bloody Chamber)

What’s introduced here? A desperate father, a wager gone wrong; betrayal of the deepest kind for a daughter. How beastly is this beast? We know we are not in a naturalistic story, at his mention, and that uncanny elements will be at play. How horrific her loss of choice. What happens next?

“Suddenly – dreadfully – she wakes up.”
The Wind Blows, Katherine Mansfield

The main character erupts into consciousness just as the story does, and something awful has either happened in her dream or is happening around her. These five words, and the clever use of the staccato energy of dashes as punctuation create a suspenseful beginning.

“Lilith was sexually cold, and her husband half-knew it, in spite of her pretenses.”
Lilith, Anias Nin (from Delta of Venus)

Nin creates an intriguing beginning that establishes the theme of pretense, and tension between a husband and wife. She wastes no words in getting to the “obstacle” of sexual frigidity, which the narrative then explores.

“First, mother went away.”
Being Kind to Titina, Patrick White (from The Burnt Ones)

An understated rendering of a life-changing event.  We sense this story will be about loss, and survival from the perspective of a child.

“My lover Picasso is going through her Blue Period.”
The Poetics of Sex, Jeanette Winterson (from The World and Other Places)

Here, Ms Winterson twists and subverts several aspects at once with her wry feminist perspective. Picasso is a woman, not a man. The reference to her “Blue Period” seems at first to be about art – but as we read on, she subverts our expectations with a description from her female lover’s viewpoint of  her behaviour when she’s menstruating, creating a secondary word-play on the meaning of “period”.

A strong first sentence finds a way to lean into the themes of the story, to be simultaneously at the beginning, and also at some other important emotional or thematic elsewhere in the story.

All of these examples show the writer’s agility and ability of story-telling. They know how their story unfolds, and they place the reader at the best vantage point to survey the story’s landscape. Prominent characters are introduced and emotional tones are established.

All of these sentences achieve one other more complex thing: the first sentence houses the seed of the story. The microcosm of the macrocosm.

What do I mean by this? Come back with me to the “vantage point” metaphor. As the writer, we locate our opening sentence at a specific point in space and time. We direct what the reader gets to see, but we also look out over the story landscape, noting the important stand-out features. These features can be themes or crucial plot-points or core emotional evocations of a character’s relationship to themselves, other characters or the world.

We describe where we are, and then we project our vison deeper into the story-world. We use words to link where we are (as character or narrator) to one of those prominent features. Or we lean into the metaphorical wind blowing at us from our story-world, to capture something evocative about our story, carried to us on that breeze. A scent of something, or a seed.

In your opening sentence, situate the reader where you want them at first contact with your story,  then try giving the readers a hint of something enticing to be encountered further into the narrative. What your first sentence introduces can then be elaborated upon in your opening paragraph.

I once did a movement theatre workshop around the theme of story-telling. One of the exercises was to find a first sentence of a favourite book or story, and translate that sentence into a movement piece – with a beginning, a middle and an end. The facilitator believed in the power of first sentences; that they could in some way, convey the entire essence of the story.

As a writer and editor, I’ve become increasingly interested in this idea: a strong first sentence finds a way to lean into the themes of the story, to be simultaneously at the beginning, and also at some other important emotional or thematic elsewhere in the story.

Short story writer Eudora Welty conveys a similar idea here:

“A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood.”

A large proportion of story drafts that I receive as a developmental editor have not had enough care and attention given to their opening sentence and paragraph. Eighty percent of the time that’s where I begin the work with the author. I’ve read openings of books already on sale on Amazon that have typos and grammatical errors in their first paragraphs. I have read no further, nor have I bought the book. And I would never be inclined to look up that author again.

I’ve nothing against self-publishing as a concept. But, writers, it should never be an excuse for releasing sloppy work onto the market. Use beta-readers, find yourself a skilled editor, or consider developmental editing to hone your work. Ensure it’s copy-edited before you release it. Putting unpolished, un-edited work before the public eye is not going to benefit your reputation as a writer. In fact, it will do the opposite.

From a writer’s perspective, I understand why haphazard, slap-dash story openings happen. We’re in a hurry to get it on the page before the idea fades. We’re impatient to just start the damn thing, and we can’t wait to get into the meaty part of the story. So we bumble and stumble bull-headed through our opening, when this is the part of the story where we most need to take care.

If this is what it takes to get you started, great. But go back and revise your opening once the heat of that first wave of inspiration has subsided. Then sleep on it, and revise again. As you generate more material, be aware that your true beginning could be somewhere in the middle of your draft.

This is one place where developmental editing can really offer something to the writer. I work with the author, giving them permission to slow down, take a breath. I ask questions, give them a framework in which to take a better look at the details of their opening, and I show them what they should be focusing on, or point out details have been sketched too hurriedly and aren’t clear to someone standing outside that writer’s head.

Write. Revise. Write. Revise.

Once you have that stellar, kick-ass beginning, revise it again. How tight can you make it? How clear? How intense” Can you eliminate excess words or phrases that are muddying the meaning or the impact?

In short, will it give the reader the most compelling view of your story-world?

The more essential every word you render in your opening sentence and paragraph, the more intense its impact will be upon the reader’s imagination.

Striking Chords of Metaphor in Fiction-Writing (II)

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Creative Process, Figurative language, Inspiration, Metaphor, On Writing, Take Pen in Hand, Writing Process

In an interview in 1981, author William Gass spoke of his “hunch” that “the core of creativity is located in metaphor”. Gass went on to suggest that “a novel is a large metaphor for the world.”

In my previous post on metaphor, I described strong metaphoric presence as casting “a fine web of meaning over the entire story. All its separate strands are also interconnected; the metaphors have their own perfect geometry and symmetry. The strands give both shimmer and strength to the story; they catch the individual perceptions and associations of individual readers within their sticky threads.”

Strong metaphor allows a story to transcend its own boundaries, which is what Gass is getting at when he suggests that a novel is a metaphor for the world. Strong metaphor allows a piece of art to exist in the mind and (I would argue) the very body of the reader in terms of the sensations and emotions elicited upon first contact with the metaphor(s). Metaphors are doorways of and to perception.

 

The babbling of King Lear in the storm, and the sharp, manic grief of Hamlet live in my body. So does the image of Persephone descending into the Underworld, Angela Carter’s dark fairy-tales, Jeanette Winterson’s searing, lyrical metaphors on love and loss, and the painful examination of mortality and meaninglessness in Beckett’s Endgame. I may no longer recall the exact plot, but I retain the themes, the images, the metaphors, for they are connected with feeling, with lived experience.

I’m mixing my play-texts and my literature here because at a formative part of my intellectual life, I read and studied both avidly. Researching these articles, I was drawn back to theatre theory. Theatre is a powerful medium for metaphor, combining both text and the visual mediums. Speaking on the relationship between spectator and performance, director and theorist Eugenio Barba observes:

“There are spectators for whom the theatre is essential precisely because it presents them not with solutions but with knots. The performance is the beginning of a longer experience. It is the scorpion’s bite which makes one dance.”

If we take the spectator here to equally stand for the reader, and the performance to represent the story, this observation echoes what I express about metaphors and images living on in my body and memory, long after I have engaged with the work.

As a former theatre director, I’m often struck by the similarities between the relationship a writer has with a story and a director has with the piece of theatre in creation. Both must have an overarching perspective on their work, and yet a precise attention to every detail. In other words, both macro and micro perspectives are required, sometimes simultaneously. Both must elicit meaning and atmosphere from the text. Both may feel they have ‘command’ of the characters, yet also find that the characters themselves have their own inner life and intentions; exemplified in the first instance by the common writerly assertion that characters ‘take over’ or write themselves in certain parts of the writing process, and in the second instance by necessary collaboration with actors who will bring their own insights to the characters. I share another of Barba’s insights here; this one on the technique required of the director (writer) in working to create the performance (story):

“For me, the director [writer] is rather the person who experiments with ways of breaking the obvious links between actions and their meanings, between actions and reactions, between cause and effect.”

This, of course, is only one way of looking at the aim of fiction-writing. But to me, it speaks to the curating of unique perspective and voice, and the conscious dismantling of clichés, which is the kind of writer I’m working at being. I may not always succeed – but to create work full of clichés would be like a little death to me, and I don’t mean the orgasmic kind.

What is a cliché? It’s often a tired, over-used metaphor. Long ago, linguistically speaking, a cliché was once an original metaphor, but they have been brandished so frequently that they have lost their impact. Encountering clichés disengages me from any text; the more frequent they are, the more likely I am to want to throw the book across the room. Perhaps that’s why I don’t own a Kindle. A careful writer will be vigilant for clichés in the drafting process. My editing clients soon know that I am ruthless about eliminating clichés in their work, and stretching them to find fresher imagery.

This leads me back to metaphor. In the first post of this series on metaphor, I suggested a starting place for drawing out and deepening metaphor in your work: your themes. If you want to know one place where your metaphors are to mine, begin with them.

Themes centre around nouns.

Desire. Loss. Love. Betrayal. Madness.

You could also call these the subjects of the work. The nature of those nouns (or subjects) can be expounded upon to create a theme, and the theme is then mined to create imagery, metaphors, and motifs, throughout your work. So another way of understanding a theme is that it expresses an opinion on the subject. If we go back to my initial list of nouns, I’d expand them to potential themes as below:

Following one’s desires has unexpected consequences.

Loss creates suffering, and suffering creates growth.

Love is essential to the human experience.

Betraying someone knowingly creates negative karma.

Madness is merely an unsanctioned perspective on the world.

There may be major themes and minor themes in a literary work. A writer may express a theme through narrative action and scenes, and through the characters; their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Its function is to bind together various other essential elements of a narrative.

Below is an exercise designed to draw out more information about your theme and deepen your metaphors. I’ll be referring to my two most recent short stories Chords of Desire and The Forbidden Box to illustrate steps of the exercise.

TAKE PEN IN HAND

Have you got a current early draft or idea for a story? Pick out one of its themes that you’d like to explore further. Write it at the top of a blank page /screen. Next, do you have any objects / symbols in your story that are associated with that theme? Add that to the top of the page.

For example, in both of my stories, the impact of a secret is a theme. Coincidentally, both stories feature an important object (also a symbol) associated with secrets. In The Forbidden Box , an old box has secrets, as does the owner of the box. In Chords of Desire, the object associated with secrets is a cello. It’s a major theme in the former story, a minor theme in the latter.

This is a free-associative exercise. Simply allow yourself to write a series of sentences about your theme and /or your object. Think about them separately, but also play with linking them in the same sentence. “Rest” your mind on what you know about your story so far while doing this. In other words, allow your ideas about the theme to be filtered through your story-world. Take about ten minutes to do this.

If you don’t have a current draft, go back to your list of personal themes / symbols from the first post, and choose one or two of those.

(So, while you do that, I’m off to make a pot of tea … Back soon …)

I’m back. I’d love to peek over your virtual shoulder and see what’s on your page, but as I can’t, here’s a selection of my statements from my draft-work.

The Forbidden Box

Theme: Secrets                                       Object: The Box

Boxes are three-dimensional walls.

The lid of a box, when opened, is like a mouth, spilling forth secrets.

Boxes hold the tangible and the intangible: artefacts and memory.

A locked box is like a mystery, waiting to be solved.

Boxes are miniature rooms.

Boxes are for keeping things in, but also for keeping things out.

*

Chords of Desire

Theme: the impact of secrets            Object: Cello                                                            

 I am shaped to hold secrets; hollow yet fecund.

For them, I play an entirely more compelling movement, like a hidden code in a forbidden love letter.

But there are stories and there are secrets. The secrets I keep deep in the hollow of my body. These she shall not have.

*

Inevitably, you will generate some metaphors and some similes amongst your list. You may not use all of them in your stories; some you will re-draft and re-word. But I’ve found I generally use more than half in some way or another, and they can be a great way to generate more material when you stall. How might you use these?

•  As part of a character’s dialogue, or their inner thoughts.
• A repeated thematic motif throughout a work, particularly if a more poetic or lyrical style is what you are exploring.
• As part of the narrative itself – for example, if the story is written from third-person omniscient perspective.

Some statements may also become an idea or image which you will explore and illustrate throughout the narrative of your story, rather than you using those words literally. For example, The Forbidden Box is a re-imagining of the Pandora myth, and the image comparing the opening of the lid of a box to the opening of a mouth and the spilling of secrets is an image that helped me link the idea of family secrets, and of adults not revealing vital information to Pandora until she was ready, to Pandora’s burning curiosity to discover what’s inside the box, and what is revealed when she finally opens the box. The shut lid of the box is juxtaposed with the shut mouths of her grandfather and grandmother.

Below is a small excerpt where I used some of the statements in different ways. In this excerpt Pandora is about seven years of age ( I’ve also re-written one or two words so as not to reveal certain elements of the story – for those who I hope will get to read the full version at some point if it’s accepted for publication):

“The box, Grandma, the box!” was all she could say, when Grandma asked what was wrong. Grandma tried her best to reassure Pandora that whatever she had seen had been a trick of the light, and her imagination.

After dinner, lighting his pipe, Grandfather announced:

“Best not to go near that box.  It’s very old, and very valuable. It’s not a toy, not even for very intelligent young ladies like yourself. Do I make myself clear?”

For the first time in her life, she was only too happy to let something forbidden to her, stay forbidden. But for years she would have strange dreams about the box, where the figures in the carvings would come to life and speak to her, where voices would whisper open me … see what’s inside.

A shut box is just like a secret, waiting to be unlocked.

*

The theme of family secrets, information being withheld is there in the dialogue, and the last line is a re-working of:

A locked box is like a mystery, waiting to be solved.

Note that you can also use this exercise just with a significant object or symbol in your story. I’ve used it to generate the bulk of the material for a memoir short story I wrote about my mother’s life, family secrets, mother-daughter relationships, grief, and her journey with cancer. The two symbols I explored using this exercise were my mother’s hands and an unusual topaz ring.

The theme of the impact of a secret brings intrigue, complexity and depth into the narrative and the characters. It was there in the seed of both stories, yet it could have remained dormant or half-asleep. I consciously put my creative attention on that theme (among others) and worked to draw it out further.

Free-association writing reveals to your conscious mind what your subconscious already knows; it enables you to know what you know. It can help some writers get past internal blocks. What you come up with may surprise you and help you gain more insight into what this particular story wants to express about your themes through your metaphors.

By playing upon your theme(s), you will immediately develop, deepen, and multiply the play of metaphor in the work.In a stunningly written book on the theme of callings, author Gregg Levoy relates this about powerful story-telling:

“A tradition in both Middle Eastern and Hebraic mysticism holds that any passage of sacred text, any teaching, any story, must be examined from at least three points of view: literal, metaphorical, and universal (mystical or wordless). None excludes the others. Meaning thus becomes a thing of layers. Those with a poetic basis of mind understand this. Where science goes for the unified theory, poetry voluptuates in nuances. Where logic studies the wind, poetry regards how the boughs are bent.”

Meaning becomes a thing of layers: metaphors assists you in creating these layers.

(If you find this exercise helpful, I’d love to hear from you.)

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