In this technique boost, I just want you to swim around in openings. Listen to them aloud almost like a poem, just to let the rhythms and approaches open up possibilities for you. Then try imitating a few using your own content.
First Person Novels
1. Set up the character’s underlying anxiety through story content, and then nail it to the real world though more detailed imagery.
“When I was a young girl, my mother read me a story about a wicked little girl. She read it to me and my two sisters. We sat curled against her on the couch and she read the book from her lap.” Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
2. Directly address the reader with a strong sense of voice, a parenthetical remark, and a surprising bit of direction.
“Take care to chop the onion fine. To keep from crying when you chop it (which is so annoying!), I suggest you place a little bit on your head.” –Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
3. Use strong voice and strong visual imagery to establish sense of place and character.
“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.” –As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
4. Write description that carries a lot of emotion and tone, pulling between opposites. Make a subtle distinction, framed by descriptions that carry the same duality. Image, observation, image.
“The branches are bare, the sky tonight a milky violet. It is not quiet here, but it is peaceful. The wind ruffles the black water towards me.” — An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
5. Bury the focus of your sentence in facts, echoing the journey described.
“At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on Country Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.” — A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
6. Start with unusual syntax nailed down with time and place.
“My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema.” — The Accidental by Ali Smith
Third Person Novels
7. Grab attention through extreme scenario and immediate conflict.
“Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle’s living room asking for the statue back.” — Run by Ann Pachett
8. Establish character through interior thoughts made concrete by an image of place.
[Note: this novel is 1st person in that a character named Orhan Pamuk is telling a story of which he has only a little part. Therefore, it mostly reads as third person . . . Madame Bovary is similar.]
“The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.” — Snow by Orhan Pamuk
9. Start with place and time. Describe what it was not, how it was different.
“Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.” –A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
A Couple of Mysteries
10. Jump into the action, packed in and immediate with at least three elements (here, parents, accident, marriage).
“My parents died in an automobile accident the year after I was married.” — A Simple Plan by Scott Smith
11. Engage a storytelling voice, a sense of complications and schemes and a certain perhaps sinister unreliability. The language here sounds old-fashion to us, but the set-up is great.
“I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; without her in truth I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips.” — The Aspern Papers by Henry James