Building Up Steam

Wednesday down, so far so good. Okay, so it was a slow start. But I put down 160 words, at least according to Open Office. I'm more or less satsified with it, but it's clear i will need to drill down a little bit more specifics when i'm working on the Singer's story. It has less action and more reflection, so I'll need to be better prepared as i write it.

It was like so, but it wasn't...

I've heard it asked, often, "Oh, where to start, where to begin..."
Surely you must realize that this quite the silly question. There really is only one place to start: the beginning. You think it's obvious, but if it was, then why does everyone always ask that question before they start telling a story. How many times have you read a Bathtub Story? You know the kind...

"Jasmine slipped into the water of the bath she had prepared, looking back on all that had happened. She knew that she would never be the same again. It happened like this..."

Seriously. What the hell is that? You don't know Jasmine. You've never met her until now. You don't give one flying hootenany about what happened to her. Never be the same? The same as WHAT? Why should I care what she was like if she's not going to be that way again. I didn't know her before. I have to care about who she was before I can care about who she is. So start at the beginning, and let me get to know Jasmine.

That's starting at the end. Why would you do that? If you're planning to write a bathtub story, stop. Rewrite it. Or I'll punch you. Really, that's my favorite part of the bathtub story. punching you.

But Jasmine you're not supposed to like Jasmine before all of this, you say! She was a little bit of a bitch, you know. Bullspit. If I can't sympathize with her, I'm not going to care about her changing.

Start at the beginning.

There was a boy called Eustice Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it

I'll admit, i'm a little bit obsessed with opening lines to novels. Think I'm kidding? See that line, right there to your left? it's the one that is, more or less, my bio for the blog. What do you think that is?

The opening line is, perhaps, the most important single sentence in an entire story. It sets the entire tone, grabs you, shakes you and demands that you pay attention. PAY ATTENTION! Here are some of my favorites...

• "It was like so, but it wasn't..." from Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers
• "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel..." from Neuromancer by William Gibson
• "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice..." from 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new..." from Murphy by Samuel Beckett
• "It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him..." from Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• "In five years, the penis will be obsolete..." from Steel Beach by John Varley
• "Marley was dead, to begin with..." from The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed..." from The Dark Tower, The Gunslinger by Stephen King
• "As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect..." from Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• "The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: 'Phillip Marlowe...Investigations.' It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby hallway in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it with the same legend is another door which is not locked. Come on it--there's nobody here except for me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if you're from Manhattan, Kansas..." from The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler.
• "I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better..." from Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett.
• "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth..." from THE BIBLE!

There's plenty more, I'm sure. Anyways...

Activities for the Day

• Begin writing chapter 1, from the Singer's story (160-ish words written)
• Blog about beginnings and opening lines (less briefly than expected)

Music of the Day

• The Best of Nina Simone by (you guessed it) Nina Simone

Current recreational reading

• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Goal(s) for tomorrow

• Further outline & plan the Singer's Story
• Continue writing as possible in chapter 1
• Continue to blog (about why blogging is actually important to this novel-writing process)