Category: Essays

A great while ago, I had the great honor of lecturing about the introit at an undergraduate fiction seminar. As I am presently distracting myself from what I ought to be doing, this is a quick summary of what I spoke about.

For those not in the know with one of the technical terms for it, the introit of a novel is the opening line or paragraph. It’s where an author presents his/her most outstanding programming code. We remember the good ones are because they contain everything you need to know about comes next in the narrative. Some are burned into cultural consciousness because they are so effective, like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “Call me Ishmael,” remains immortal, and still another golden oldie is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Let’s examine a few examples of an effective introit.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

What makes it work?
1. We know that this is going to be a first-person narrative, and, more importantly, that he (or she!) is an intelligent and articulate narrator. Expect gymnastic and playful prose.
2. We know that whoever Lolita is, he was obsessed with her, and therefore might not be a reliable narrator. When he says he loves her, watch out.
3. Further to this, when he refers to her as his sin, we know that there is something illicit about this relationship that the narrator has with Lolita. This is an invitation to read on in order to find out why.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

1. Why would we doubt his sex, given the use of the masculine pronoun, unless we were told that there was something questionable about it? Stay tuned for an explanation about why gender roles can be mutable.
2. The rest of the sentence lends itself to the fantastic and an antiquated sense of the exotic, and the narrative ahead doesn’t disappoint.

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

In later years, holding forth to an interview or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal.

1. We know that Sam Clay created comic books, is respected and famous, is from Brooklyn and always had a taste for larger than life heroes.
2. The use of more elevated sentence structure, as well as the citation of Angoulême, can indicate that the narrator wants for the reader to take comic books and things like larger-than-life heroes seriously. You could also argue that the narrator is deliberately setting up a pastiche of elevated concepts and wants to bring them down to a more universally accessible level.

What are some introits that could be better?

Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the bouncer said, folding his arms across his massive chest. He stared down at the boy in the red zip-up jacket and shook his shaved head. “You can’t bring that thing in here.”

The problem is that it lacks specificity. There’s no indication as to where the story is going to go, or even what kind of story it is. It could be set anywhere, and it could be any manner of story ahead of you. It’s just description of the characters, and it’s entirely superficial.

How could you revise this? Looking at the rest of the page, here’s something more effective.

“I’ve told you a thousand times, kid. No stakes allowed.” The bouncer turned away and distractedly minded the sparse stubble on his balding head. He spat and added, “I don’t give a damn if it’s part of your costume.”

Now you know 1. there’s a kid trying to get into a bar; 2. it might be Halloween; 3. the bouncer’s completely uninterested, even contemptuous of the kid; 4. the kid is always trying to get into this bar with wooden stakes; and 5. the kid is dressed like a vampire hunter. We know that some kind of paranormal creatures will be involved, so keep reading for that.

George P. Pelecanos, The Double

Tom Petersen sat tall behind his desk. He wore tailored jeans, zippered boots, an aquamarine Ben Sherman shirt, and an aquamarine tie bearing large white polka dots. His blond hair was carefully disheveled. His hands were folded in his lap.

While this one superficially seems specific, it really isn’t. There are a lot of adjectives — which, to be fair, is evocative of noir crime fiction — but there’s no indication as to why they’re necessary. It’s essentially ineffective because it lacks momentum and a distinct voice, and it doesn’t properly prepare the reader for what comes next. Perhaps if there were something in the last sentence to indicate why his hands were folded in his lap — such as “His hands were folded in his lap, waiting.” or “He struggled to keep his hands folded in his lap.” — then we’d have somewhere to go.

But isn’t that just noir? Here’s an effective counterexample.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

The payoff in this one comes in the last line of the paragraph: He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. This provides narrative momentum because we know that, whoever Samuel Spade is, his semblance to the Prince of Darkness will be key. Perfect noir set up, where no one is innocent.

So — how do you construct one?

Every writer will develop his/her own process for finding the right introit, but usually it comes after the completion of a first draft. There are many reasons for this, but a couple would be that 1. you need to have a solid, consistent (or purposely inconsistent) voice ready to put to the page, and 2. you need to have the narrative assembled, so that you can encode clues within your introit.

The beginning is your hook, and regardless of how many wicked, quotable lines you throw into the meat of your text, the reader will never get to them if you don’t provide them with clues of what to expect. We live in a world in which there are more and more books published every year, and you can’t afford to let a lackluster introit put readers off your manuscript. I’ll admit that when I see a poorly constructed introit, I seldom continue reading on because I know that it’s highly unlikely that I’ll see any manner of skill in the pages that follow.

I struggle with introits. I still persecute myself regularly for every last opening I’ve created because I still feel they could be better and sharper. Should I ever get to the point in which I feel I’ve got a solid grasp it in my own work, I’ll let you know.

But how will you know when you have it? Because once you’ve written it, you probably won’t want to stop yourself from reading what comes next.

For further reading, Stephen King recently spoke with Joe Fassler about his favorites in an article that appeared in The Atlantic. It’s a highly recommended master class on the introit.

♥ EAB

For Bill, who proposed the idea, and Simba, who asked specifically…

I.

One of the fundamental perplexities of life is that joy and pain have such an intimate kinship with each other. On the surface, it would seem that their paths operate as strict geometric parallels, stretching out into infinity without ever meeting. Yet there is always a point at which the lines are redrawn just prior to some unforeseen railroad-like switch, where we discover that we have travelled onto the opposite path, and it is at that point in which we must either immerse ourselves within joy or somehow endure the pain until we encounter another switch that puts us back on the other side.

The consolation when confronted with pain is that nothing lasts forever, be it through analgesic, better fortune or death. The converse principle on the smiling obverse of that coin is that joy, like pain, doesn’t last forever either, be it through injury, worse fortune or death. The hard reality for the living is that change and time supply the music in our dance through life, and when they unite in silence is at our final change of state, when time as we know it in this existence runs out, and we meet death. Some might argue that the dead have it easier. However, if you’re averse to the mere concept of permanent stasis, bear in mind that the dead have left this life, a life that is fundamentally composed of alternating currents of joy and pain. You could just as easily intuit that because they know no pain, they know no joy, either, which just might mean that Heaven is a very boring place indeed.

There seem to be many more words available to describe pain than there are to describe joy, perhaps because when we are experiencing joy, we have little instinctive desire to document it (save through the modern phenomenon of photography that provides its own one thousand-word description, but that, too, can fall by the wayside). We tend to do whatever is necessary within that moment to savor it and perhaps prolong it.

Joy is most often derived from a shared experience. If you were to honestly consider all the best moments of your life, there was most likely at least one other person with you at those moments of unmitigated elation, and unless you are the rare, ever-categorizing sort, you most likely didn’t interrupt the shared moment to quantify and qualify it while in the rapturous company of others. We are at our very core social creatures who extract so much from our experiences through others. If you doubt that, you should reconsider the fear of being alone, for it is a force of nature that should never be underestimated.

Pain, however, is part of that long dark night of the soul, which is most likely why we have so many more words for it. We have a need to document it in order to understand it, alleviate it and hopefully avoid it in the future. There are words that try to identify with another’s pain, such as sympathy, empathy and apathy, all derived from the Ancient Greek word pathos (πάθος) meaning “suffering.” When we are sympathetic (sym- meaning with), we try to duplicate another’s suffering without necessarily having a frame of reference for it; when we are empathetic (em- meaning in), we try to relate to a similar moment in our lives when we experienced similar suffering; and when we are apathetic (a- meaning without), we are so numbed so as to be removed from feeling anything. All of these are sharp vocalizations of the inherent truth of the situation, which is that pain is always unique and cannot ever be experienced in the same way or at the same time by two different and discrete people. There’s the chance that we might bond with someone who is living through a similar brand of pain and derive some small consolation (joy?) from that palsied connection, but it’s woefully misguided to assume that there is perhaps some comparative measure for another’s pain, adding further isolation to the experience. Pain is intrinsically lonely, regardless of how much we might try to help another through it, and although each experience is unique, we approximate it somehow through the vocabulary afforded us that describes pain.

II.

Two words come to mind when describing extreme sensations of pain: agony and anguish. Strangely enough, one of these words is encoded with hope.

Anguish comes from the Latin noun angustia, meaning “difficulties, trials.” This connotation serves as an abstraction for its alternate definition of “narrowness,” and it in turn came from the adjective angustus which specifically meant “narrow” or “not spacious.” When we think of anguish, we’re propelled into the loftier hells of the mind, for it is divorced from physicality. If it does have any physicality, anguish comes with imagery of the hands-wringing intellectual contemplation of the unpredictability of a situation. It is descriptive of the limitations caused by pain and subsequently over any control we might have upon it. Will this pain, these difficulties, this claustrophobic state last until the end of my life? If so, how much more pain must I endure? And if not, how long until the hurt is gone? The answer is never immediately available, which is the root of anguish, the myopic perspective of being unable to perceive the temporary nature of pain.

Agony arrived in Britain via Ancient Greece from the words agonia (ἀγωνία), meaning “emulation, competition, struggle” and agon (ἀγών), “contest.” The word stems from conditions that are inherently physical, and when we are suffering through immeasurable physical pain, we are said to be in agony. Agony, however, is often associated with a strictly metaphysical context, for it is used within Christianity to describe Christ’s inner torment in the Garden of Gethsemane. When faced with his own impending death and ultimate self-sacrifice, Christ’s confrontation with his internal fear is considered agony.

One could say that there are two wrestling matches with angels demonstrating a more literal context of agony within the Bible: the first is the physical struggle between Jacob and the angel within the Book of Genesis, and the second the more metaphysical event of Christ wrestling a figurative Angel of Doubt while in the Garden as recounted in the Gospels. Both are contests from which a victor is meant to rise above the fray. Just as with any life or death struggle that any of us encounter, whether it manifests physically or otherwise, our survival instinct motivates us to vanquish our opponent. (It’s rare that such pervasive despair would grip someone within the throes of such a struggle, causing them to seek defeat and death.) It is in this relentless pursuit of victory that we discover the deeply hidden sea of hope within the word agony. The triumph over an opponent and liberation from pain are rewards within themselves, and on the other side of successfully enduring agony is the promise of joy that demonstrates our strength, our resolve, our victory. Outlasting agony is joy in itself.

III.

Not that this is wisdom that comes easily. Most often, it’s when we survive a brush with death that we appreciate life most, and similarly it’s through triumphing over pain that we are able to cherish joy within the moment for all its subtleties. It’s not always the case, though, for as we make our way through this world, we acquire aching wounds that use their power to spin the coin of life along its edge, leaving us hanging in the balance while we wait for the coin to settle on the stoic resolve of one side or the beaming laughter of the other. It’s in this uncertain state, the only true state there is, that we appreciate that all those lines that separate joy and pain are irrevocably blurred, and their seemingly parallel paths are illusory at their worst and a matter of perspective at best. In the ideal, the removal of pain results in joy and vice versa. But life rarely allows such purity, which clues us in to a profound esoteric knowledge that joy and pain are most likely expressions of the same great thing, and they come from some mysterious place that we mortals cannot know, where the gods and the dead sing in praise of the grand purpose behind enduring pain and cherishing joy.

Nevertheless, we the living arrive at the same question over and over again: it is worth it, this agonizing struggle, this anguished moment?

Only time will tell.

It always perplexes me that many writers feel the need to establish rules for writing. Some of them are useful, like those from Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman. Others are ridiculous, and you can identify your own personal bugbear from the more ludicrous ones compiled by The Guardian here and here. I find it amazing that purists are still insisting that writing on a computer without internet access is the only path to tread. The internet is an indispensable tool when you use it wisely, just like a computer (not just a solitaire/minesweeper machine) or a thesaurus (not just a doorstop) or a pen (not just a nervous chew toy). Dollars to donuts, I’m sure there was a rule by some other esteemed writer who posited, “Never write on a typewriter, for only writing actual words on actual paper gives you the proper sense of rhythm.”

The truth of the matter is that if a writer imposes a set of rules for writing upon you, he or she is ignoring the beautiful, subtle mathematics behind the art, and trust me, they’re there. These subtle machinations are expressed within the language of relativity and dictate that each writer’s experience and writing experience is unique and unto itself. Do yourself a favor and remember that cribbing off another writer’s set of rules for creation is rather like borrowing someone else’s internal checklist for what s/he desires in a lifepartnersoulmate. A great part of writing is falling in love, be it with your story, your language, your catharsis, or whatever it is that brings you to put words down. You’ll never fall in love if you follow someone else’s rules, because try as you might, you’ll never be able to fool the gods of chemistry.

The best advice I’ve ever gotten was to read the first letter in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. If any of it makes sense to you, then trust me when I say that it’s only a matter of time before you recognize and understand that there are no rules.

♥ EAB

P.S. Speaking of writing, I’ve got news coming over the next few days. Stay tuned.