Story Openings

[Walter Cummins]

Story Openings

Story openings now have several goals to accomplish. The first is to engage the reader immediately and create a desire to engage with what will happen. That goal has become more crucial in recent years when readers have so many more choices to fill their time, and not just fictions on a page. Magazine editors abet this pressure because they are bombarded with submissions. Editors don’t have the time or patience to indulge a leisurely writer. More and more decisions as to what stories they will read through are based on the appeal of the opening. Many editors admit that if the first page doesn’t grab them, the story submission will be rejected immediately, the rest unread. People opening a book or a magazine often judge as quickly.

 A second task of the opening is introducing the dramatic issues of the story, in most cases the frisson of conflict or uncertainty that will become the basis of the plot..

 A third task of an opening is to quickly establish the “world” of the story—its place, its space, its time span, its linguistic tone. 

 Here are some examples from real stories.  Let’s assume they’ve passed the first text of creating a reader need to learn more about the situation described in just a few sentences,

 Here is the opening of Nadine Gordimer’s story “Blinder”: “Rose lives in the backyard.  She has lived there from the time when she washed the napkins of the children in the house, who are now university students.”

Even a reader who was unaware that Gordimer was writing about South Africa during the years of apartheid would recognize that Rose is a servant relegated to a backyard who works for a family affluent enough to afford tuition for their children.  At one point Rose had to clean the diapers, nappies, of those children.  Those sentences suggest these opposite circumstances will have an essential role in the story and that something will finally cause a clash. 

 Alice Munro also refers to university students in the opening of her story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”:  “Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university.  It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs cooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish.”

 The conditions introduced here are more complex that those of the Gordimer story, much more than just the contrast of poverty and financial security.  In fact, the details result in more questions than answers.  Why is this upscale home so sloppy?  Who is Grant, the one who regards it as luxurious and disorderly?  In this case, the details provide a set of unknowns. 

John Updike opens “Personal Archeology” with this long sentence: “In his increasing isolation--elderly golfing buddies dead or dying, his old business contacts fraying, no office to go to, his wife always off at her bridge or committees, his children as busy and preoccupied as he himself had been in middle age--Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land.”

 Although this litany reveals a great deal about Craig Martin’s present condition, it also tells much about his life before this moment in his old age, his career and lifestyle.  What he no longer has informs his immediate need to fill his time.  As little as the reader knows about what happens next with Rose and Grant and Fiona, it’s clear that Craig’s story will be about his confrontation with the emptiness of his now life. His new interest implies that he will discover something significant about the land that may relate to his personal need.

The opening of practically any successful story of recent years can be analyzed similarly. In essence, it captures the reader with a why.