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Chapter 17: Writing a Gripping Opening
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It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the
Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
—Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar, Heinemann, 1963)
Setting the scene with descriptive
openings
Although books often used to start with a long passage of description, especially
in the 19th century, that technique is unfashionable nowadays. However,
a great piece of description can without doubt set the scene for a novel effectively,
especially if that location is important, as is the case in these three
examples.
Getting only a great first line from a descriptive opening is difficult, because
the effect is usually cumulative. I suggest you go away and read these three
beginnings in full.
This quote, featuring Hemingway’s famous direct prose style, draws us
straight into the world of the story:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked
across the river and the plain to the mountains.
—Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, Scribner, 1929)
This simple statement of fact tells us exactly where we are:
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
—Karen Blixen (Out of Africa, Putnam, 1937)
I cheat with the next quote and include three sentences. Conveying the full
brilliance of this opening with one sentence is impossible, especially because
Dickens breaks up his sentences into fragments. The success lies in the sense
of atmosphere conveyed and the mysterious hint that the description of the
world outside somehow also relates to the man sitting indoors:
Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s
Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if
the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth . . .
—Charles Dickens (Bleak House, Penguin, 1985, first published 1852–1853)