Writer Series: Openings #2

I've mentioned before how great I think Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son: Stories" is. The opening I am posting for this installment is from a short story called "Work." For writers in particular, I think just the opening paragraph shows how a talented writer can make prose both entertaining and potent. Johnson came to fiction from poetry and that lineage is evident throughout the collection. BTW, Jesus's Son is also a movie, starring Billy Crudup. The movie averages four star reviews at Amazon, but I wouldn't go that high. I felt the movie played too much to the humorous side -- and there is wonderful humor in the stories -- while marginalizing the darker side. But then, Johnson has a cameo in the movie and I assume he approved of the tone, so what do I know? Anyway, check it out:

I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever know, for three days, under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.

Quote

The doubts of an honest man contain more moral truth than the profession of faith of people under a worldly yoke.
-Ximenes Doudan

Quotes

I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

-Konrad Lorenz

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

-Simone Weil

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

-James Richardson

Writer Series: Openings #1

When you have a spare half hour, walk to your bookshelf and pick out ten fiction novels or short story collections at random. Sit down and read the opening, not going beyond a page or so. What effect does each opening have on you? What authorial techniques make some so effective? What is missing from those not so effective?
As a writer and a reader I just love the openings of novels and short stories. Openings are daunting for all writers I think, because of the weight of responsibility they bear. Their simple task is, of course, to orient the reader (even if to orient means to disorient). The opening is there to give us some or all of who, what, where, why, when and maybe how. Deciding how much to give of just these can be a challenge.
But openings in the hands of a talented author are so much more—they set the tone of the novel, foreshadow, set up the theme, let us know what we can expect from the language (is it erudite and complex and you better have a dictionary at hand, does it use historical references, is it childlike?), and the word choice can tell us if our POV character is a child, a racist, uneducated, genius, arrogant, etc.
When not done so well, the author’s failed attempts at some or all of these can confuse the reader before they’ve finished a few pages. Why are the thoughts of a philosophy teacher given to us using mostly monosyllabic words? Why is a child of nine referencing the feelings of a broken heart or lust? Why are the thoughts of a teenager lamenting his first lost love almost clinical in their detachedness and language? It’s not that I think readers ask these questions (well, writers who read do), but rather they perceive it at a subconscious level, and it may be enough to make them close the book. Stand in an airport bookstore sometime and watch people considering books. They tend to read the back cover and then the first page—that’s all we writers get, and the only part we have any control of is that first page.
For the next several posts I want to examine some openings I enjoyed, starting with a few short stories. Although short stories differ in many ways from novels, the openings must try to accomplish the same things. The openings I have chosen are not the result of any serious research on my part…just a few I think hit the mark.
I am a serious Raymond Carver fan. One of my favorite stories, and one I analyzed to death in college, is the title story from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories. Here are the first four paragraphs:
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he’d spent five year s in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that?”

Plus ça change

I was reading tonight about the Salem Witch Trials and I took comfort in knowing that now, more than three hundred years later, we no longer condone Peine forte et dure, French for "hard and forceful punishment."
Those silly Puritans just didn't know what to do if a person wouldn't cop to the crime, but they figured out a fair and sensible solution, which was for the prisoner to be:

remanded to the prison from whence he came and put into a low dark chamber, and there be laid on his back on the bare floor, naked, unless when decency forbids; that there be placed upon his body as great a weight as he could bear, and more, that he hath no sustenance, save only on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread, and the second day three droughts of standing water, that should be alternately his daily diet till he died, or, till he answered. (Wikipedia)


Take Giles Corey, for example, of who like scores of others in 1692-3 was accused and refused to enter a plea. Unthinkable and unacceptable! So here was the process for good old Corey, taken from Wikipedia:
As a result of his refusal to plead, on September 17, Sheriff Jonathan Corwin led Corey to a pit in the open field beside the jail and in accordance with the above process, before the Court and witnesses, stripped Giles of his clothing, laid him on the ground in the pit, and placed boards on his chest. Six men then lifted heavy stones, placing them one by one, on his stomach and chest. Giles Corey did not cry out, let alone make a plea.


After two days, Giles was asked three times to plead innocent or guilty to witchcraft. Each time he replied "more weight". More and more rocks were piled onto him, and the Sheriff, from time to time, would stand on the boulders staring down at Corey's bulging eyes. Robert Calef, who was a witness along with other townsfolk, later said, "in the pressing, Giles Corey's tongue was pressed out of his mouth; the Sheriff, with his cane, forced it in again".


Three mouthfuls of bread and water were fed to the old man during his many hours of pain. Finally, Giles Corey cried out at Sheriff Corwin, "I curse you Corwin and all of Salem!" and died.


But the English beat the Puritans to the punch (stone?) and proved themselves not to be sexist (or opposed to feticide) either, when they subjected pregnant Margaret Clitherow to a similar fate in 1586 for being a Catholic (bastard!).

Yes, it's not just for Virginia Slims we can say--you've come a long way, baby!

(Oh, Plus ça change = the more things change, the more they stay the same)

Blogs -- Trees falling and Esse est percipi

A blog is the proverbial tree in the woods...are you, the blogger, content knowing the tree fell, or do you argue it only exists when someone has heard it? Berkeley argued Esse est percipi or "to be is to be perceived."
I don't know if I've decided that for my blog yet...the argument is essentially, is your blog a diary you leave out to be read or an online opinion column you need/hope is read. In the first case you really don't care about visitors, while in the latter you do. If you do the question becomes, what is the value of all that commentary? The recent social phenomenon of the web has inundated us with "amateur experts"--or put another way, those who know nothing but know it all.
As a writer, I enjoy the concept of a blog because my brain engages differently when I write (versus thought or speech). I also like the idea of turning somebody on to a writer, a musician, a thought, an article, a poem--whatever--that they may not have known before. I know I have picked up all of those and more at other blogs. Still, I don't know if I care about visits or comments--or is that self deception? If I don't care, why post to a public place at all, why not just write a journal?
I think ultimately blogs are representative of everyone's desire to be heard more than a desire for community. Community is an open forum where there is no leader, no namesake, just a threaded discussion (as painful as these can be), not a blog where One starts all dialogs and you are then free to respond to One. But at least it encourages discourse. My biggest lament for American Democracy is that we have moved from debate to hardcore, my-way-or-the-highway ideological points-of-view. Sad, too, because you can be no stronger in your ideas than when you crave and welcome challenges that shake your ideas to their cores.
What's the point? Hell if I know...I'm the One and I don't need no stinkin' point...but I think I'm trying to decide if I need to hear that tree fall or not.