Book Done Yet?: First Sentence Submission

My mentor for my MFA, Lee K. Abbott, was a terrific teacher. Half of what I babble about in here, Lee taught me. Sittin’ and thinkin’? That’s pure Lee. And now as I’m ripping apart the beginning of Nita again, I’m thinking of something else he used to torture us with: The One Sentence Submission.

“Suppose,” he’d say, “that you could only send the first sentence of your story to an editor. And if he or she liked it, then you could send the second sentence . . .”

Those of you who are writers probably went looking for the booze right about now. Or chocolate. Whatever calms your racing heart as you contemplate the disaster that is your working draft.

So I looked at the first sentence of my draft. I could spend some time here talking about how this is still discovery draft (because it is), but that’s irrelevant because I showed it to people (that would be you). Once you show you work to people, you have a mandate not to waste their time. So here’s how I wasted yours:

“Detective Nita Dodd spotted her brother as soon as she got out of the car.”

Yeah, that’s not good. Well, it’s 90% not good. It does get my protagonist in the first sentence and her title helps get the story started but after that, all it tells you is that she has a brother and she rides in cars. It does absolutely nothing to establish her as a character.

I know some of you are saying, “Wait, that’s too draconian.” No, it’s not. As your mother always told you, you only have one chance to make a first impression. Don’t start with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Or “Detective Nita Dodd got out of the car.”

I am capable of writing more interesting first sentences. Most of my category first lines are terrible–well, I was still trying to figure out how to load paper in the printer at that point in my career–but I did better when I got to solos:

Tell Me Lies: “One hot August Thursday afternoon, Maddie Faraday reached under the front seat of her husband’s Cadillac and pulled out a pair of black lace bikini underpants.”

Welcome to Temptation: “Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.”

Fast Women: “The man behind the cluttered desk looked like the devil, and Nell Dysart figured that was par for her course since she’d been going to hell for a year and a half anyway.”

Faking It: “Matilda Goodnight stepped back from her latest mural and realized that of all the crimes she’d committed in her thirty-four years, painting the floor-to-ceiling reproduction of van Gogh’s sunflowers on Clarissa Donnelly’s dining room wall was the one that was going to send her to hell.”

Maybe This Time: “Andie Miller sat in the reception room of her ex-husband’s law office, holding on to ten years of uncashed alimony checks and a lot of unresolved rage.”

So if this is my first-sentence style, what do they all have in common?

• They start with the protagonist.

• She’s in an uncomfortable place.

• She’s in trouble.

• She’s angry.

• She’s in action.

Evidently when it comes to protagonists, I have a type.

So breaking that down:

1. I always start with the protagonist because I want my reader attaching to her. This works because the reader, consciously or subconsciously, is looking for somebody to root for. So I put her in the first sentence–I got your girl right here, folks–and that way there’s no mystery about who this story belongs to.

2. One of the strongest ways to make a reader/viewer attach to a character is to saddle her with misfortune she did not cause, to put her into trouble she doesn’t deserve. Humans have a strong sense of justice pretty much by the time they can sit up and grab a sippy cup, so seeing something that isn’t fair can strengthen that reader-protagonist bond. That means that when we see somebody like Maddie, who’s nice enough to clean out her husband’s car, realize she’s being cheated on, we’re gonna be Team Maddie unless she does something to screw that up.

3. What she does with that misfortune is the next step: if she weeps or whines, we’re not going to want to stick around. If she stands up and says, “No,” gets mad, moves toward a goal, even if only by implication, we’ll root for her because we love a fighter.

So put her in the first sentence, put her in trouble, put her in motion.

And now back to Nita. Nita’s sick, but not in trouble, and she doesn’t really go into action until she talks to Vinnie and Nick.

So we cut the first scene, the one where she gets out of the car. Then the second scene between Nick and Vinnie gets pushed back. The story starts when Nita walks into the bar (“A protagonist walks into a bar . . .”) and confronts Nick. Then Nick and Vinnie can talk in the next scene. And Nita and Button and maybe Mort in the next scene? Hmmm. But I think starting in the bar is a good idea.

“At one AM on the morning of her thirty-third birthday, Detective Nita Dodd walked past two dead bodies and her ex-lover to enter Hell, where she met the Devil.”

That’s not going to work either–it’s too cute and over-the-top–but it’s a lot better than “Nita Dodd got out of the car.”

Back to cogitating.

Tomorrow: Book Done Yet?: Second Sentence Submission. While you’re waiting for that bit of brilliance, how about posting great first sentences that you have known in the comments? You know, for inspiration. (Here are some good ones.)

[Person of Interest post on “Terra Incognita” will go up on Tuesday; we’ll be talking about time and storytelling. Guess how I feel about flashbacks.]

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