To Begin, To Begin
Clark Blaise
"Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to
begin. "—Donald Barthelme
The most interesting thing about a story is not its climax or denouement— both dated terms—
nor even its style and characterization. It is its beginning, its first paragraph, often its first sentence. More
decisions are made on the basis of the first few sentences of a story than on any other part, and it would seem
to me after having read thousands of stories, and beginning hundreds of my own (completing, I should add,
only about fifty), that something more than luck accounts for the occasional success of the operation. What I
propose is theoretical, yet rooted in the practice of writing and of reading-as-a-writer; good stories can start
unpromisingly, and well-begun stories can obviously degenerate, but the observation generally holds: the
story seeks its beginning, the story many times is its beginning, amplified.
The first sentence of a story is an act of faith—or astonishing bravado. A story screams for attention, as
it must, for it breaks a silence. It removes the reader from the everyday (no such imperative attaches to the
novel, for which the reader makes his own preparations). It is an act of perfect rhythmic balance, the single
crisp gesture, the drop of the baron that gathers a hundred disparate forces into a single note. The first
paragraph is a microcosm of the whole, but in a way that only the whole can reveal. If the story begins one
sentence too soon, or a sentence too late, the balance is lost, the energy diffused.
It is in the first line that the story reveals its kinship to poetry. Not that the line is necessarily
"beautiful," merely that it can exist utterly alone, and that its force draws a series of sentences behind it. The
line doesn't have to "grab" or "hook" but it should be striking. Good examples I'll offer further on, but consider
first some bad ones:
Catelli plunged the dagger deeper in her breast, the dark blood oozed like cherry syrup....
The President’s procession would pass under the window at 12:03, and Slattery would be ready…
Such sentences can be wearying: they strike a note too heavily, too prematurely. They “start” where they
should be ending. The advantages wrested will quickly dissipate. On the other hand, the "casual" opening can
be just as damaging:
When I saw Bob in the cafeteria he asked me to a party at his house that evening and since I wasn’t
doing much anyway I said sure, I wouldn’t mind. Bob’s kind of an ass, but his old man’s loaded and there’s
always a lot of grass around…
Or, in medias res
“Linda, toast is ready! Linda, are you awake?”
Now what's wrong with these sentences? The tone is right. The action is promising. They're real, they
communicate. Yet no experienced reader would (go past them. The last two start too early, (what the critics
might call an imitative fallacy) and the real story is still imprisoned somewhere in the body.
Lesson One:
As in poetry, a good first sentence of prose implies it’s opposite. If I describe a sunny morning in May (the
buds, the wet-winged flies, the warm sun and cool breeze), I am also implying the perishing quality of morning
in May, and a good sensuous description of May sets up the possibility of May disaster. It is the singular
quality of that experience that counts. May follows from the sludge of April and leads to the drone of summer,
and in a careful story the action will be mindful of May; it must be. May is unstable, treacherous, beguiling,
seductive, and whatever experience follows from a first sentence will be, in essence, a story about the
Mayness of human affairs.
What is it, for example, in this sentence from Hugh Hood's story "Fallings from Us, Vanishings" that
hints so strongly at disappointment:
Brandishing a cornucopia of daffodils, flowers for Gloria, in his right hand, Arthur Merlin crossed the
dusky oak-paneled foyer of his apartment building and came into the welcoming sunlit avenue.
The name Merlin? The flourish of the opening clause, associations of the name Gloria? Here is a lover doomed
to loneliness, yet a lover who seeks it, despite appearances. Nowhere, however, is it stated. Yet no one, I trust,
would miss it.
Such openings are everywhere, at least in authors I admire:
The girl stood with her back to the bar, slightly in everyone's way. (Frank Tuohy)
The thick ticking of the tin clock stopped, Mendel, dozing, awoke in fright. (Bernard Malamud)
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. (Jorge Luis Borges)
For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old, he thought falling dead was the very
zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. (Richard Yates)
Our group is against the war. But the war goes on. (David Barthelme)
The principal dish at dinner had been croquettes made of turnip greens. (Thomas Mann)
The sky had been overcast since early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but tedious, as is usually is
when the weather is gray and dull, when clouds have been hanging over the fields for a long time, and you
wait for the rain that does not come. (Anton Chekhov)
I wanted terribly to own a dovecot when I was a child.(Isaac Babel—and I didn't even know what a
dovecot was when I started reading.)
At least two or three times a day a story strikes me in the same way, and I read it through. By then I don't care
if the climax and denouement are elegantly turned—chances are they will be—I'm reading it because the first
paragraph gave me confidence in the power and vision of the author.
Lesson Two:
Art wishes to begin, even more than end. Fashionable criticism—much of it very intelligent—has emphasized
the so-called "apocalyptic impulse," the desire of fiction to bring the house down. I can understand the
interest in endings—it's easier to explain why things end than how they began, for one thing. For another, the
ending is a contrivance—artistic art is believable, yet in many ways predictable; the beginning, however, is
always a mystery.
Criticism likes contrivances, and has little to say of mysteries. My own experience, as a writer and
especially as a "working" reader is closer to genesis than apocalypse, and I cherish openings more than
endings. My memory of any given story is likely to be its first few lines.
Lesson Three: art wishes to begin again. The impulse is not only to finish. It is to capture. In the stories I
admire, there is a sense of a continuum disrupted, then re-established, and both the disruption and reordering
are part of the beginning of a story. The first paragraph tells us, in effect, that "this is how things have always
been," or at least, how they have been until the arrival of the story. It may summarize, as Faulkner does in
"That Evening Sun":
Monday is no different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the
telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees....
or it may envelop a life in a single sentence, as Bernard Malamud's often do:
Manischevitz, a tailor, in his fifty-first year suffered many reverses and indignities.
Whereupon Malamud embellishes the history, a few sentences more of indignities, aches, curses, until the
fateful word that occurs in almost all stories, the simple terrifying adverb: Then.
Then, which means to the reader: "I am ready." The moment of change is at hand, the story shifts gears
and for the first time, plot intrudes on poetry. In Malamud's story, a Negro angel suddenly ("then") appears in
the tailor's living room, reading a newspaper.
Suddenly there appeared ...
Then one morning ...
Then one evening she wasn't home to greet him ...
Or, on the chilling construction of Flannery O'Connor:
...there appeared at her door three young men ..they walked single file, the middle one bent to the side
carrying a black pig-shaped valise....
A pig-shaped valise! This is the apocalypse, if the reader needs one; whatever the plot may reveal a few pages
later is really redundant. The mysterious part of the story—that which is poetic yet sets it (why not?) above
poetry—is over. The rest of the story will be an attempt to draw out the inferences of that earlier upheaval.
What is often meant by "climax" in the conventional short story is merely the moment that the character
realizes the true, the devastating, meaning of "then." He will try to ignore it, he will try to start again (in my
story "Eves" the character thinks he can escape the voyeurs—himself, essentially—by moving to a rougher
part of town); he can't of course.
Young readers, especially young readers who want to write, should forget what they're taught of
"themes" and all the rest. Stories aren't written that way. Stories are delicate interplays of action and
description; "character" is that force which tries to maintain balance between the two. "Action" I equate with
danger, fear, apocalypse, life itself; "description" with quiescence, peace, death itself. And the purest part of a
story, I think is from its beginning to its "then." "Then" is the moment of the slightest tremor, the moment
when the author is satisfied that all the forces are deployed, the unruffled surface perfectly cast, and the
insertion, gross or delicate, can now take place. It is the cracking of the perfect, smug egg of possibility.