Doors to worlds

Drafting the perfect opening sentence

A few years ago, a man asked me how many piano tuners there were in London. It was certainly an interesting way to start a job interview. Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? I had no idea either.

No, that doesn’t quite work. The opening needs to put more pressure on the reader, like they’re in the interview. Let’s try again.

How many piano tuners are there in London? Go on, have a guess. Pretend it’s a job interview. After all, that’s where I first heard it. (Not that I knew the answer.)

Nice opening question, but the rest is too clunky. It needs to be more subtle in setting the scene.

How many piano tuners are there in London? Go on, have a guess. Pretend it’s a job interview. It was when someone asked me that a few years ago. Still not sure? I know the feeling.

Nope, still too clunky. If I’m going to get this in a newspaper, it needs to be much smoother.

How many piano tuners are there in London? As job interview questions go, it could have been easier.

That’s more streamlined, but it’s still telling rather than showing. The reader can decide if it’s easy on their own. Get to the possibilities faster.

How many piano tuners are there in London? Someone asked me that in a job interview a few years ago. Are there dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? I had no idea either.

OK, this is better. Gets to the point. But I don’t like that third sentence – maybe just need ‘Dozens’?

How many piano tuners are there in London? Someone asked me that in a job interview a few years ago. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? I had no idea either. And yet, in science, similar questions crop up all over the place. How many species are there on Earth? How many neurons does the brain have? How many planets are there in our galaxy?

Good, that’s my opening paragraph sorted. Now to finalise the rest of the piece…

Photo by Geert Pieters via Unsplash.

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In her 1988 essay ‘The Fisherwoman’s Daughter’, Ursula Le Guin starts by quoting the opening sentence of Virginia Woolfe’s novel Jacob’s Room:

‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave.’

‘It is a woman writing,’ Le Guin observes. ‘Sitting on the sand by the sea, writing. It’s only Betty Flanders, and she’s only writing a letter. But first sentences are doors to worlds.’

It can be difficult to craft such doors. When I drafted and re-drafted the piano tuner text above for a 2012 Guardian essay, I wanted to capture the feeling of a new estimation problem. The curiosity. The uncertainty. The pressure. Where to start? Where to go next?

My inexperience as a writer made this a particularly slow and painful process. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t get much better. While working on my books, I’ve sometimes spent hours refining a single paragraph for a chapter opening or ending.

A beach, and also a door. (Photo by Esther Cuan via Unsplash.)

I’d discover that other writers craft and draft just as much, and often much more. As I began to write more frequently, I’d turn to resources like The Open Notebook and Nieman Storyboard to learn from the best journalists, while also finding a new fascination with storytelling in fiction.

Many of the best openings start with problem. One of my favourite styles is an opening that captures the sensation of ‘it took me a while to appreciate what I was dealing with’. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the opening line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History opens with a similar sense of delayed insight:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

I’ve also noticed Kazuo Ishiguro uses this approach throughout his novels to create a sense of foreboding. For example, in Never Let Me Go:

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that.

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If you want to understand the power of stories, Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling is a good place to start. It ranges from the psychology of protoganists to the neuroscience of narratives. And as you might expect, its opening sentences draw you in immediately:

We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity.

But that’s not how we live our lives. Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it. We beetle away happily, into our minutes, hours and days, with the fact of the void hovering over us…

The more I’ve agonised over openings, the more I’ve appreciated them. After J. R. Moehringer ghost wrote a certain princely autobiography, I became curious about what else he’d written. One of his best known pieces was a 1997 article for the LA Times. Here’s how it begins:

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about.

Sometimes the tension of finding an opening can be inspiration for an entire piece of writing. In her New Yorker article ‘Forty-one false starts’, Janet Malcolm profiled artist David Salle. To reflect Salle’s fragmented style, Malcolm structured the entire article as if it were a series of abandoned openings. In the 17th of these, she quotes Salle describing the frustration of his creative process:

When I work, I feel that I’m doing everything wrong. I feel that it can’t be this hard for other people. I feel that everyone else has figured out a way to do it that allows him an effortless, charmed ride through life, while I have to stay in this horrible pit of a room, suffering. That’s how it feels to me.

And suddenly, I am back again in my PhD accommodation, fine-tuning those piano tuners. Because that what a good opening does. What good writing does. It opens a door, and gives us the feeling of a new world.