When I was writing journalism, I always tried to lead with a provocative first sentence. I had either read about this or my editor told me to do it: every piece needed that hook, what is known in the jargon as the lede. Though I am less likely to think in those terms now when I write, for a while, I wasn't happy with a piece unless it started with a zinger of a sentence.
In genre fiction, there is a notion that the writer should start off each chapter with a bang and end in a similar way, which then gets the reader to turn pages. The effect is more about using a ploy so as to assure a reader will want to keep reading, which has nothing to do with the quality of the writing and the effect of the prose. Though this can seem outwardly manipulative, I would say writers of literary fiction also, on occasion, feel the need to use such devices.
In an essay1 for the New Yorker, the novelist Akhil Sharma talks about how, after the success of his first novel, he was humbled to take a different approach to writing:
In the first novel, paragraphs end by pushing the reader into the next paragraph, and the next paragraph begins by reaching out and grabbing the reader. In the second, the paragraphs follow each other, but they do not push and pull. The difference has to do partly with the subjects of the books and what those subjects require, but it also emerged from my new understanding that the reader needs to do as much work as the author.
The author recognized that he wanted to retreat from heavy-handedness and lean in more toward persuasion, and in turn, to show more respect, and trust, in his readers.
Reading a novel, I tend to open it and scan those first few sentences and try to gauge my reaction. What am I looking for, exactly? To be pleased, delighted, perhaps, motivated by curiosity to read more. Here are the openings of two novels I read recently:
“It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father's death and my mother's sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. It was my father’s long illness that had kept me there, and with its unhappy resolution I was suddenly free to go.” -Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
“In the mornings after breakfast I walked past a small marble plaque propped against the high wall flanking the road. I never knew the man who died. But over the years I've come to know his name, his surname. I know the month and day he was born and the month and day his life ended. This was a man who died two days after his birthday, in February.” -Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Neither of these novel openings jump out at the reader in the aggressive manner I talked about above. If anything, these writers have a calm and engaging style that compels a reader by the hint of underlying mystery. These writers are carefully observant, reflective, composed, even somewhat detached from their own experience. Such a voice has trained me as a reader to expect there is something more beneath the surface, and to want to read to find it.
This is from Charles Baxter, in an essay in his excellent recent book Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature2:
Alfred Hitchcock, in his interviews, always made the distinction between suspense and surprise. There is surprise, Hitchcock observed, if you tell the audience a crucial piece of information that the character may not know. If the audience knows that there's a bomb ticking away here in the room where we sit, but we in the room don't know, that's suspense.
In other words, suspense is the promise of surprise.
I created suspense in a novel by revealing the aftermath of a situation and leading with hints and by deploying a parallel narrative that eventually reveals the full events of what happened. There is a good deal of complication—and confusion—about what really happened that gets hashed out among characters as the narrative progresses. This is creating suspense as Hitchcock might have it but doing it by titrating information to the reader, the way someone might tell you a traumatic story in confidence. (Granted, Hitchcock was also talking about movies; my approach is for a non-genre, long narrative novel.) This might seem manipulative, but in fact, the only eyewitness account originates from the protagonist whom we understand has, naturally, his own biases. In other words, no one is ever entirely clear about “what happened,” just as in life.
“The value of a message is how surprising it is,” says Jerry Harrison, the former guitarist and keyboardist for the Talking Heads3. To hear a musician say this about writing, in fact, surprised me, and I immediately recalled Sting saying something similar. As an amateur guitarist who occasionally writes songs, I would say there is often that subtle chord you find that is just right, and yet so surprising. That it can subvert or challenge your expectations in a stirring way. As if going along in a song we are mildly interested in, and then that one chord makes us perk up and pay attention.
This sensibility can be applied to writing fictionis something that I think applies to writing: if the writer can be surprised, the reader will be, also.
Suspense is the promise of surprise.
I have often tried to pinpoint these moments that occur as I'm reading a novel. I call them “silent beats.” These are the moments when, as a reader, I hear the equivalent of that subtle chord. Perhaps in writing it is a lot less overt than that. After all, there is a gaping distance between composing a song versus a novel.
I suppose this is making a plea for the confidence of writing that doesn't try to use verbal gymnastics or pyrotechnics to gain those all-important eyeballs of readers. Even when submitting a novel, publishers want to see a synopsis and list of chapters and beats, for an accounting of every character’s utility, and to be assured that you, the writer, have achieved forward moving action. This approach has always been anathema for me (though I usually have to resort to it in afterthought). Though I don't begrudge logic, I think the quiet work of narrative achieves its mastery and movement more effectively through tone and register, rather than checked boxes.
This subtlety is a hallmark of literary writing. Like any enigma about creating art, it’s a quality that cannot quite be named, though you know it when you read it. It doesn’t rely on hitting a quota, or assuring this chapter kicks the reader squarely to the next one. If that’s the case, it seems to me then that the prose is beside the point, as well as the story, and everything else that makes reading, and writing, so satisfying. These are the alchemical tricks of prose that cannot conform to any formula for how it is done.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/rethinking-a-first-novel
The essay, “Captain Happen: Some Notes on Narrative Urgency”, is among a selection on craft that Baxter is adept at, in the book mentioned above.
In my early teens, I was obsessed with the music of the Talking Heads. This interview on Marc Maron’s podcast offers an enlightening autobiography. In the quote, Harrison was citing the work of Claude Shannon (1916-2001), aka, the father of “information theory.” : http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1351-jerry-harrison