In a final draft, perhaps it is true: the first sentence is crucial—that handshake, making a first impression, the date, the human connection…
But when a piece of writing is new, still a fresh cluster of ideas and images coming together, the first sentence is nothing more than marks on a page. It’s a fine place for mistakes and missteps. Perhaps the first sentence will hold the smallest fragments of cohesive thoughts, like fragments of bone found at a crime scene: scattered, seemingly invisible, and yet so significant, telling a story, speaking back to events.
Oof!
I admit, I didn’t know where that sentence was headed, but I’m interested in where it landed because the words came as a surprise.
But really, a first sentence might simply be a line of letters forming words that make sounds that create a sensation or an image in mind that you like. It might be nothing at all beyond joy in the process.
Writing is difficult because it really is about trying, in an open-minded, risky, vulnerable and uncertain manner, then stepping back and judging yourself—often, harshly! Ha!—then trying again. It’s about granting yourself freedom, then worrying about audience—(Do people need a trigger warning, before bone fragments? Before “crime scene”?—)…
The difficulty is internal while the eventual audience is external. But getting started with an idea is about putting all of those concerns aside.
This is why a good punk show and a basic job in the mix of humanity is sometimes enough of an essential proving ground to get started writing: the mosh pit of words. Let your thoughts knock into each other. Don’t sweat it! Don’t get too caught up in pleasing anybody but yourself.
Katherine Dunn said that when she was writing Geek Love, each time she started a new chapter she thought she was working on the first chapter of the book. Then she’d write another section, and move the previous chapter back. “I wrote the book backwards!” she said, laughing, speaking to my students, in an amazing class.
I don’t always even start putting words down until I find the sentence which invites me to step into a project, turning that key in a lock. I’ll hold an idea in mind. I might take the dog on a walk. Footsteps against a sidewalk are so similar in the mind and body to hitting a keyboard, to ideas, to stringing together words. Walking and letting the subconscious do the work is just fine. A sentence will find its way into my thoughts while I’m looking at a box of free cast-offs, a motorcycle under a tarp, the branches of a tree, a stranger on the street. Once I have that sentence, I can start writing. It may not be the perfect first sentence. It’s only one door, opening.
Whatever you’re doing, writing or reading, walking or worrying or talking or looking out at the world, I’d say listen for the moments that call to you and see if there’s a larger idea, there. Even if you aren’t writing, it is a way of getting to know yourself. “You can only show your own face,” Tom Spanbauer has always said. I believe he means that the details which call to us reveal who we are.
Here’s what Katherine settled on after writing, revising, restructuring Geek Love:
“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
How’s that for an invitation to a party?
The language itself is dancing, mysterious and multi-syllabic and imaginative from the start.
I miss Katherine! Portland was fortunate to have her, living here. She was a friend, and also a school without walls, a way of learning in conversation. Now we have her stories, and our own.
Hope you find some time to get out, wherever you live and however you move through this time and place in which we live. Stay safe. Oregon is cold today. It’s rainy and dark. It’s noir, and thriller terrain, muddy in the ditches, rain soaked alongside the roads, and yet also so very quiet where I am. I’ll likely walk under those pale grey skies before the day is over. I’ll write a few pages, too, and drink coffee and live on chocolate and listen to language, birds, sirens, neighbors and friends. Wishing you all the best of inspiration, ideas and connection.
M
ps—If you have a favorite first sentence, hope you might go to my other post and add it to the collection! I love those. Also, if you have thoughts, feel free to comment! One thought: Maybe your first sentence, at this moment, could be one you write, below…without expectations, and only with a sense of audience in that you’re posting it here. Sometimes an audience is all a person needs to get rolling in the most low-budget, highly human art around, imo. This could be our own mosh pit of language, hearts and audience. Go ahead. Tap out a few words. How might it be, how might it feel?
xo
Wow did Katherine Dunn have great handwriting. I used to run into her at Jim Redden's office at PDXS when I'd drop off cartoons for him. Portland was such a great underground literary town, especially when I lived above the Great Northwest Bookstore. I'd see Tom Hardy (the artist, not the actor) and Walt Curtis, Gus Van Sandt, Will Vinton... it was really something. Portland in the early 90s was almost as mythologized as 50s Greenwich Village. Music, poetry, art, a vivid social scene.
This has nothing to do with the topic, I know. That signature took me back. Is it the city I miss, or being in my 30s? Hmm.
A first sentence, the first fifty pages, the first three chapters.... most of them are usually pretty good because they get worked and reworked like a poem. The problems happen later in the novel, the second act, the third act, the denouement, the arcs and internal logic, the stylistic consistency (or lack of it). Novels are tough, and they seem to get tougher. I guess that means I'm growing in my craft. My own satisfaction is the worst gauge of quality!
Love it. Glad to see you writing about it.