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what we can expect from the language (is it erudite and complex and you better have a dictionary at hand, does it use historical references, is it childlike?), and the word choice can tell us if our POV character is a child, a racist, uneducated, genius, arrogant, etc.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?”