Skimmy Dipping

What's it like to skim through dozens of opening paragraphs, hoping to catch a surge of creative inspiration, before you nestle into your writing chair with fingers poised above the keyboard, ready for those words to come that will hook not only the reader, but you the writer?

Is it kind of like dipping into a Ben & Jerry's with a spoon when you're stuck mid-sentence, only to double dip, knowing the second bite will be even more satisfying?

Maybe it's more like rewriting that opening line, over and over and over again, changing one word, then a phrase, while studying your fingernail cuticles.

Surely it's not like waiting in line for 90 minutes for the Tower of Terror ride at Disney, only to find its all a blur of noise as you search in the dark for a glimmer of light.

Determined to find out, I pulled out my 38 issues of One Story and my six copies of The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories and sat down to skim.

* I should note here: I don't believe this is the correct method of carefully studying literature. Just like skim milk cannot nourish a baby the way whole milk can, skimmy dipping into literature isn't a writer's multivitamin, it's more like licking the buttercream frosting off that last cupcake.

So back to the stories, lots of them. After only a handful of stories I found it hard to skim, so I stopped skipping words and slowed down.

Longer sentences, consisting of four or five lines lost my attention compared to sentences with only ten words or less, like this one:

Andy Catlett was a child of two worlds. (in Wendell Berry's "Nothing Living Lives Alone" 2012 PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories)

After more than 20 stories, I found myself coming to the conclusion that each story has a unique opening. Patterns may be repetitive. Dialogue in the first sentence is rare. My favorites included character, plot, and tone in the first sentence. And in some of them, I saw myself, or rather my style of writing.

Whether skimming opening paragraphs is a trait of slush pile readers, I don't know, but after an hour of reading the first few lines of each story my head buzzed and I had to check the mirror to see if my eyes were crossed.

So much talent in so many words did leave me feeling inspired, but I realized one thing that's impacted my writing the most: I can't find my voice, my words, in the writings of others. The words of other authors are like the songs of birds, beautiful and moving, but my own song can only come from within, and I hear it best when I tune out the words around me and listen to what I have to say in my own way.