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.

Hooked by the Second Sentence

So many online literary journals, so little time.

We skipped around this week to the small and big literary journals, and decided to sample what's out there for fiction first sentence hooks! What stands out to you? Sometimes it isn't the first sentence that hooks us, but maybe the second one. Our eyes read the first line quickly, and in a second our minds decipher the meaning, but by then we are already on to the second sentence. Perhaps it is the second one that truly hooks us.

Make this an exercise. Read the first lines below, and then go to the stories and read the first and second sentences. Were you hooked by the first sentence or did it happen after you read the second one?

Marigold wanted a Chihuaua.

By John Oliver Hodges from "Bristles" in the journal Compose

One of our family’s favorite films is the Cary Grant classic “Arsenic and Old Lace,” in which Grant’s young and dashing character, Mortimer Brewster, about to elope with his sweetheart, discovers that his adorable maiden aunts have been happily murdering lonely old men (which they consider putting the poor dears out of their misery) and having Mortimer’s delusional cousin, Teddy Brewster (who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt), bury them in the cellar.

By Suzanne Vincent from "Galloping Insanity" in the journal Flash Fiction Online

Nobody ever listens 2 me, says Flowerpower420.

By Eric Llloyd Blix from "Things I Sometimes Do: Real Estate Adventure" 

in the journal Paper Darts

Yancey swishes down the dirt road, feet aflutter.

By Ann Beattie from "Yancey" in the journal Paris Review

 This happened when there was a country called Yugoslavia.

By Yoko Tawada from "To Zagreb" in the journal Granta

Mnted a Chihuahua.

Marigold wanted a Chihuahua.

To Shock the Reader or Not

Is it overkill to begin your story with a first sentence that shocks the reader?
Here's a taste of three anticlimax openings:

She drugged her professor then took back her essay.

The man killed the boy's dog, leaving it on the driveway for the children selling lemonade to see.

Sure the kiss was tainted with poison but she'd rather die than let him live.

I think these first sentences show the most important thing coming first, followed by something less important, but is it too shocking for the reader?
Does it feel like the author is trying to force it too much? Or would you keep reading?