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220 Part IV: Developing Your Plot and Structure
In Pride and Prejudice the whole theme of the story is encapsulated in the following
sentence, together with Jane Austen’s dry and ironic tone. Readers soon
discover that Mrs Bennet is very keen to marry her daughters off to rich men:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of
a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
—Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, Dover Publications, 1995, first
published 1813)
In Anna Karenina the theme is marriage – its success and failure. Immediately
after this sentence readers are plunged into a crisis in Anna’s family involving
adultery:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.
—Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett,
Modern Library, 2000, first published 1877)
Speaking from the start:
Dialogue openings
I’ve heard people say that you should never start a novel with dialogue, and
so perhaps that’s why all this section’s opening lines have a mixture of dialogue
and prose. The great thing about dialogue is that it gets straight into
the characters and the action. It’s immediate and compelling, as if readers are
overhearing a snatch of an intriguing conversation. In this quote, the whole
premise of the novel is made clear:
‘You too will marry a boy I choose,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her
younger daughter.
—Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy, HarperCollins, 1993)
This next quote is fairly dramatic, because the author plunges readers into
the middle of a tense conversation:
He said, ‘Save yourself if you can,’ and I said firmly enough, though I was
trembling and clutching at straws, ‘I intend to’.
—Beryl Bainbridge (Every Man for Himself, Gerald Duckworth, 1996)
The following quote is intriguing: who are the American and Leamas and who
are they waiting for?