A black cloak snapping in the wind

or, trusting in an opening (and concerning the optimal preparation of lentils...)

Jisa raced through the alley, black cloak snapping in the wind. Her feet darted across puddles, night-lights of the city rippling and distorting in her wake.

And the rain beat down, incessant.

Those are the opening lines of a book and I’m not sure I like them.

It follows with this:

Almost, she thought, sprinting forward. Almost. She swallowed, right hand tight around the device in her palm—the little drive holding truths to fell a city’s lies. Would they still? she wondered. She wanted rid of it. Wanted to hand it over, let her part in this be done. But most of all, she wanted this panic gone.

She had to find Zinn.

Image credit: OpenAI’s DALL-E-2.

The book is my own. Unfinished.

I’ve stared at those lines a lot, changing them, un-changing them, never quite satisfied. An opening has to work; it has to coax a reader in, assure the reader, intrigue them. I’ve given up on books—almost certainly to my loss—because the first lines or pages didn’t speak to me or because they felt clunky, or the writing not in a style that I like. It’s made me feel all too weary about an opening being weak. About it treading a fine line between enough and too much.

Discussing the openings of books has likely been done to death, but it got me thinking about the authors I like and the books I’ve loved and to what extent their first lines mattered to me. Some I can think of and recall straight away; others…? *Shrug* I have no clue.

I’ve just—whilst writing this, whilst scrawling nonsense—moved about the house pulling various books from shelves and glancing at the opening mush of words and asking myself how much the order and choice of those words speaks to me. How much trust do I put in the rest of the book—in the author—based on those words alone? Is this wrong of me? Is this too hasty? I own the books, so it’s not as though I’m going to unpurchase them. But sitting down to write some of these out, I’m actually surprised that not all of these are as strong or compelling as I figured they would be.

I’ll start with Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings¹, the first book of his Stormlight series, which I originally loved (with all his work, the worldbuilding and magical systems are superb) but after the last couple of verbose entries—and being unable to [shock!] slog through Mistborn—I’m left, well, feeling a bit burnt out on Sanderson. A bit…bleh. Here’s the intro:

Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast. The enormous stone beast lay on its side, riblike protrusions from its chest broken and cracked. The monstrosity was vaguely skeletal in shape, with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulders. The eyes were deep red spots on the arrowhead face, as if created by a fire burning deep within the stone. They faded.

Yes, yes, words and descriptions and things. It’s OK. I’m in because I want to read a fantasy book and I know Sanderson has the chops, but the style doesn’t scream at me in any way [evidently it did, at one point].

I’ve just read Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards², which I’ll talk about another time, but here’s the intro:

Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.

Bret’s trusting you to hang in there with a lot of words in a single sentence. That’s a general theme throughout the book. His style flows for me and there’s enough intrigue here that the door is held open long enough for me to want to step through. Be yanked through, if I’m honest. And wheeee—oh, yeah, another time, right.

But then I flop open Hyperion³ by Dan Simmons, one of my all-time favourite Sci-Fi books, and this is how it begins:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

It’s an important introduction, as becomes clear. It’s clever. I’m not enveloped by it, though. But shrikey, I know spacetime sure folded around me once I got to page 2.

And then you get to one of my favourite opening’s of all time, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle⁴:

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

The perfect music for cooking pasta…

Beguiling.

(Incidentally, I’m just cooking some lentils for dinner—in silence! They’ll be ruined; either al dente pebbles or a proteinaceous soup, with no conductor bringing the boil to a close at the optimal moment. My brother did text me though, so perhaps that counts for something.)

Finally, because this is getting long and who knows if you’re still reading and this-wasn’t-even-the-purpose-of-this-post-when-I-first-started-writing-it… I’m just about to read The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon⁵. A big, hulking book of fantasy with a most wonderful yellow-gold cover. I’m excited and I know I’m going to read this because I’ve already read reviews and it’s totally my kind of thing, so the opening holds less weight, perhaps, but still, here’s how Samantha chose to begin (or maybe it was the story that told Samantha how she needed to begin):

The stranger came out of the sea like a water ghost, barefoot and wearing the scars of his journey. He walked as if drunk through the haze of mist that clung like spidersilk to Seiiki.

Great. I’m in. I’m involved. Yes, there’s a hint of fantasy stuff here even in these few lines, but I know that’s what I’m in for already, and I’m definitely in. The style, the voice, it flows. The arrangement of those words. Tasty. Thank you Samantha, I trust you, I will commence. I will savour each turn of the page.

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OK, back to my book, the thing I originally wanted to try and begin to talk about here. I guess I’m on edge to do so. The book—Precipice—has chapters in the third and first person, a narrative that moves between three central characters and explores their interconnected relationships and the world they inhabit and a larger arc about that world. But primarily it’s about them. (Probably) like many novels, it has ballooned in scope and I’m casting nets to rein it all in because—and allow me to dream for a moment—I wouldn’t want to go all Rothfuss on this if it ever did get anywhere. But in penning many chapters, I’ve come to realise that I find writing in the third person harder—when I do so, I feel less of a connection to my characters. I find it harder to be them, to follow their thoughts and desires. Perhaps I’ve consumed too much of that delicious Murakami first person singular and it dares influence anything I attempt to make my own.

So here, as a small window into Jisa’s world, I wanted to experiment in rewriting that opening. A commentary to myself, in a way. Because normally I write and make changes, but don’t witness a record of the before and after. And I’m still not sold on the opening and whether the book should be split between third and first person. Originally that was to drive the narrative in a specific way, but now I’ve come to question it.

Let’s start with the purpose behind this opening: I want the reader to be hit with something that has movement and tension, immediately placing them there in this new world and—I hope—wanting to join in on the journey. I dislike (despise?) overt exposition, so this must be minimal, but there must be enough to glean some sense of what and where and who. We need to understand there is a person, Jisa, in a hurry, perhaps anxious, delivering something important. They’re in a city and it’s raining and they’re trying to find someone else.

Here’s that existing introduction again, to save scrolling (I’m trusting that you’re still here with me; if you are, thank you, dear reader):

Jisa raced through the alley, black cloak snapping in the wind. Her feet darted across puddles, night-lights of the city rippling and distorting in her wake.

And the rain beat down, incessant.

Almost, she thought, sprinting forward. Almost. She swallowed, right hand tight around the device in her palm—the little drive holding truths to fell a city’s lies. Would they still? she wondered. She wanted rid of it. Wanted to hand it over, let her part in this be done. But most of all, she wanted this panic gone.

She had to find Zinn.

So is this more powerful in the first person? Or should it play differently? Or is it OK as it is? (My brain: argghhhhhhhh…)

Experiment 1, switching to first person present tense⁶:

I race through the alley, my cloak snapping with each gust of wind. I dart across puddles, seeing the city’s lights ripple at my feet. Above, the rain beats down, incessant.

Almost there. The doorway is ahead, somewhere. My hand—slick equally from rain and sweat—still grasps the drive. I want rid of it, want my part in this done. But more so, I want to find Zinn.

It feels more abrupt, more stuttering, forcing you to adjust to a style that I think many don’t take to. I had to pull away⁷ and return to it and even then made a couple of edits to de-clunk some wording. I like what’s implied by the line about her hand, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded overall. Hopefully there’s at least some showing instead of telling that comes through even from her direct perspective. I omitted the “black” from the cloak here, because it felt unnecessary for Jisa to think on this.

Experiment 2. Now let’s try the past tense, staying in the first person:

I raced through the alley as my eyes scanned for the doorway, feet rippling distortions of the city as I moved. The rain beat down, incessant, my cloak snapping with each gust of wind, my hand still clasped around the drive. I wanted rid of it, wanted my part in this done. But more so, I wanted to find Zinn.

Even here and in doing this, words have had to change. Originally it was just going to be switching perspective but maintaining the words, but I don’t think I can. It doesn’t work. Maybe none of it works. Maybe it has to stay the same. Maybe this whole thing was a waste.

The lentils have finished simmering. Without Rossini, without Janáček… I’ll just have to trust everything will be OK.

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Have a comment or a thought or a preference or an opening that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear. Thankfully, there’s a button and means to do that just below. There’s also another button to subscribe—it’s free; this Substack is maintained almost entirely on a plant-based diet—so that posts can go straight to your inbox, roughly once a week.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7235533-the-way-of-kings

2. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60880820

3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77566.Hyperion

4. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11275.The_Wind_Up_Bird_Chronicle

5. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40275288-the-priory-of-the-orange-tree

6. It’s probably worth noting that I have no formal grammatical training in English other than that I am English and I have read a lot of books. The public school I attended didn’t really lean into English all that much. Or I simply didn’t pay attention. One or the other. So there’s a chance I’m not even using the correct terms, let alone doing it the correct way. My day job involves a lot of science writing for journals, but the use of language there is obviously more restricted and straightforward.

7. The lentils still aren’t cooked