How not to Begin. Eastlit issue 9. Steve Rosse. Advice.Eastlit

4: How not to Begin

by Steve Rosse

There is an axiom in publishing: The cover gets the reader’s attention, but the first paragraph sells the book. Here’s the first paragraph of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” by Ernest Hemingway:

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in summer sunlight.”

Now here’s the first paragraph of a book chosen at random from Amazon:

“The sun was setting on another near-perfect day over Chaweng Beach on Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. Sitting in a beach chair in the strip of sand owned by the Baan Samui Resort, ****** watched the sunset, contemplating it and enjoying its crimson beauty. He compared it mentally to the hundreds of sunsets he’d seen on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, his native home. It was different here in the Gulf of Thailand, not the same as sunsets had been on Cape Cod Bay. Not more picturesque or less. Just…different. And he liked it. It made him mellow, put him at peace.”

It would be easy to pick the nits in this paragraph (there is no private ownership of beach front property in Thailand; there is no way to compare something other than “mentally,” etc. etc. etc.) but the real problem with this paragraph, and the reason why most people would not buy the book after reading it, is one of sonority. The language just sounds bad. The sentences have all the rhythm of a trash can falling down a flight of stairs. And the reason the rhythm of the words is awful is because the author is trying to make his first paragraph do too much.

Hemingway paints his set and doesn’t try to do anything else. He does not try to name his protagonist, much less name the city and state of his birth. He does not try to tell the reader what his protagonist is thinking. He does not try to tell the reader that the scene is “beautiful,” because he knows that writing is not that easy. A reader has to see something in his mind and feel its beauty; an author can’t just tell a reader “this is beautiful.” (If writing was that easy everybody would do it.)

The first paragraph is not a newspaper article that must identify who, what, when, where and why. It doesn’t need to carry the weight of any exposition. The first paragraph is just a morsel of cheese in a mouse trap. All it needs to do is entice.

And so, by not trying to make his first paragraph do too much, Hemingway is able to concentrate on his language. He uses spare, uncluttered sentences with pleasing cadences. He draws a map of the hillside and situates his protagonist in it and he does nothing more than that, so that his reader can hear the words and read the map.

Hemingway does not widen his scope beyond the hillside. No naming of islands or nations or provinces or states. He does not take his story beyond that hillside to his protagonist’s boyhood home. It’s a novel; he knows he’ll have plenty of time for that. He knows that his job in this first and all-important paragraph is to place a crumb of cheese in the trap. He sets himself a single small task in a single small paragraph and he achieves it with clean, flowing language.

And we must remember that Hemingway began each working day by reading what he’d written up to that point. Hemingway re-wrote the last paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms” thirty-nine times. Imagine how many times he re-read and re-wrote his opening paragraphs. I’m sure if the author of the second paragraph above had re-read his work a few more times he would have been able to improve it. Don’t be lazy, folks. Just because self-publishing allows a writer to publish his first draft doesn’t mean he should.