Where to start

Where to startin telling the story. This does not mean the verbal opening, but the scene, the condition of affairs, which ought first to be presented to the reader.
Naturally, you may begin anywhere—literally anywhere—in the story. Only, you must do so by deliberate intention and not by careless accident.
For instance, you may begin at the end, by showing Jack as a failure at college, and then presenting the conditions, the crucial struggle, and the outcome, all of which ended in his failure. Such a course demands considerable skill in story-telling, for there must be some absorbing happenings if our interest is to be maintained when all the time the outcome is known from the start. Such stories depend for their interest upon what happens before the final moments rather than on the outcome itself.
Again, the plot may begin in the very midst of the action and first show the chief character in the act of making the decision which is all-important because it leads to one resultant complication after another until the final crash— or triumph—ends the story. In such stories the foundation material is either suggested in a swift sentence or two, or skilfully revealed as the story goes on.
Or, the story may begin at the beginning, lay the foundation in full view of the reader, present the essential situation, bring the chief character to his hour of testing, and show the outcome, all in a natural way. This is the obvious way to tell a story, and therefore the way chosen by eleven amateurs out of a dozen. Do this sort of thing well or do it not at all. Superior story-telling is required to justify the laying of the scene and the gradual introduction of the characters before you have captured—don't slide over this word—captured the reader's interest, for the chances are in favor of his being absorbed in some subject other than the one you are writing about.
But wherever you begin in your plot-building, let your opening incident be a vital part of the plot and not a prelimirkary cough to clear your throat. If, as Stevenson said, you, the writer, should be able to see the end from the beginning, it is none-the-less essential that you should see the end in the beginning—that your plot- roots, big and tiny, should verily grapple every inch of earth in which you havechosen to plant your story. The end of the story will be inevitably logical only if its plot- beginnings contain the end in germ.
The opening scene.
How should a story begin? It is a question to be answered afresh with every story, and, as it is important, we must discuss it with some particularity. Certain it is that a story should begin so attractively that the reader will be tempted to go further with it, for he is under no obligation to read, and must be seduced into doing so. '
The problem of the introduction is complicated by the necessity for exposition.* This, if given by the author in his own words, is often heavy, and, though necessary to a dear understanding of the story, is in itself uninteresting. Many writers, therefore, get done with it at the outset. Yet, in such a case, what shall immediately succeed the initial exposition remains undetermined So, too, if the exposition be thoroughly dissolved in action and dialogue, the nature of the opening scene must still be decided upon. What,
aside from the general principle of attractiveness, should guide the writer to a choice of an effective opening?
The practice of many writers is to begin the story in a manner characteristic of the story as a whole. A story should be highly unified, be all of a piece. Therefore it should strike its note at the outset, and with certainty A story of adventurous action may well begin with the narration of an incident; one of character, with dialogue, analysis, or personal description; a story concerned with background or setting may open descriptively; one of idea may begin with a generalization or a bit of philosophy. Of course there is no obligation that the writer observe these practices. Merely it is advisable that he have them in mind as a possible means of effecting his purpose, which is to devise an opening characteristic of, and in harmony with, his story as a whole.
Yet, though a story should begin both characteristically and interestingly, caution is here needed. The meretricious author begins invitingly with a brisk show of action, or lively characterization and dialogue, significant we hope, of something still better to come. And that something is never realized. This is a most irritating thing, and the reader so tricked will never forget nor forgive. I remember once,
when a boy, tackling a novel by Charlotte M. Yonge. In the opening pages there was a brave glitter of action and knightly adventure, and I thought I had unearthed a treasure. After a bit I detected something ominous, and, my suspicions aroused, I turned deliberately to the last pages, to do which was not my usual practice. There, indeed, the trickery of the book lay revealed: he entered a monastery, and she a nunnery. Who she was I never knew, nor have I ever since read a page of Miss Yonge's edifying works.
In the literary shop the wise dealer labels his goods. If you do not want them, you may leave them; he will not attempt to sell you a garment half cotton in the guise of wool, for you will discover the deception to his cost. But if he is honest you may buy, even though his stock be scant, and the quality indifferent. Honesty and good intent go far to reconcile us to a lack of brains.
The danger latent in the glittering introduction leads many writers to proceed cautiously. The story may be replete with fascinating incident and its first pages be far from diverting. Those readers who persevere then congratulate themselves as the going becomes easier, and the writer, by contrast with his dulness at the outset, seems astonishingly bright. The danger, however, is that the reader will never persevere.
Most of us, nowadays, have lost the habit of reading a book from cover to cover as a moral exercise. Our interest must be aroused and held or we will have none of it. The shorter the story, the truer this generalization. In a novel, as, for example, one of Scott's, I can get pleasure by dropping whole paragraphs, and pages here and there—picking the plums out of it, so to speak. But the short story, more compactly built, cannot be so treated, for to omit a page is to lose something vital to the intelligibility of the action.
Before the citation of typical story openings perhaps a word should be said of the story which begins with a bit of philosophy expressive of the story theme, or a comment upon life which the story is designed to illustrate. This has the virtue of frankness if the story is genuinely illustrative of the philosophy, and not irrelevant to it; or of humor if the generalization is absurd or is made in mock seriousness. The danger is, of course, that the reader who prefers to draw his own moral and make his own inferences will be uncomfortable in the presence of abstract truths, and withdraw from the story. Most of us object on principle to moralizing, and prefer the story only. The writer may, however, moralize so cleverly as to justify the method. Kipling is highly successful here, and in many of
his earlier stories succeeds in interesting us by this method. Poe, too, whose themes are often interesting chiefly by reason of the underlying idea, often generalizes to advantage.
A few examples of story openings are cited:
Denis de Beaulieu was not yet two-and-twenty, but he counted himself a grown man, and a very accomplished cavalier into the bargain. Lads were early formed in that rough, warfaring epoch; and when one has been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed one's man in an honorable fashion and knows a thing or two of strategy and mankind, a certain swagger in the gait is surely to be pardoned. He had put up his horse with due care, and supped with due deliberation; and then, in a very agreeable frame of mind, went out to pay a visit in the gray of the evening. It was not a very wise proceeding on the young man's part. He would have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed. For the town was full of the troops of Burgundy and England under a mixed command; and though Denis was there on safe-conduct, his safe- conduct was like to serve him little on a chance encounter.
It was September, 1429; the weather had fallen sharp; a flighty piping wind, laden with showers, beat about the township; and the dead leaves ran riot along the streets. Here and there a window was already lighted up; and the noise of men-at-arms making merry over supper within, came forth in fits and was swallowed up
     
and carried away by the wind. The night fell swiftly; the flag of England, fluttering on the spire top, grew ever fainter and fainter against the flying clouds—a black speck like a swallow in the tumultuous, leaden chaos of the sky. As the night fell the wind rose, and began to hoot under the archways and roar amid the tree-tops in the valley below the town.—(Stevenson, The Sire de ilalitroies Door.)
Here exposition and description of place set forth briefly the conditions essential to a story of adventure. It is night, the scene a city filled with unseen dangers. That it is autumn enhances the mystery of the dark houses, which shut out the sharp wind. The hero is a young soldier, well fitted, in the warlike epoch described, to be the centre of stirring adventure.
"But if it be a girl?"
"Lord of my life, it cannot be. I have prayed for so many nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badl's shrine so often, that I know God will give us a son—a man-child that shall grow into a man. Think of this and be glad. My mother shall be his mother till I can take him again, and the mullah of the Pattan mosque shall cast his nativity—God send he be born in an auspicious hour 1—and then, and then thou wilt never weary of me, thy slave."
"Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?"
"Since the beginning—till this mercy came
tome. How could I be sure of thy love when I knew that I had been bought with silver?"
"Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother."
"And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a hen. What talk is yours of dower! I was bought as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child."
"Art thou sorry for the sale?"
"I have sorrowed; but to-day I am glad. Thou wilt never cease to love me now?—answer, my king?"
"Never—never. No."
"Not even though the 'nevi-log—the white women of thy own blood—love thee? And remember, I have watched them driving in the evening; they are very fair."
"I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred. I have seen the moon, and—then I saw no more fire-balloons."
Ameera clapped her hands and laughed. "Very good talk," she said. Then with an assumption of great stateliness: "it is enough. Thou hast my permission to depart—if thou wilt."—(Kip g, Without Benefit of Clergy.)
The story here indicated is one essentially domestic, though with an atmosphere of unconventionality and strangeness. That it is to be tragic in its denouement is, as I have remarkedinanother place, sufficiently manifest.
A military friend of mine, who died of a fever in Greece a few years ago, told me one day about
the first action in which he took part. His story made such an impression on me that I wrote it down from memory as soon as I had time. Here it is:
I joined the regiment on the fourth of September, in the evening. I found the colonel in camp. He received me rather roughly; but when he had read General B—'s recommendation, his manner changed and he said a few courteous words to me.
I was presented by him to my captain, who had just returned from a reconnaissance. This captain, with whom I hardly had time to become acquainted, was a tall, dark man, with a harsh, repellent face. He had been a private and had won his epaulets and cross on the battle-field. His voice, which was hoarse and weak, contrasted strangely with his almost gigantic stature. I was told that he owed that peculiar voice to a bullet which had passed through his lungs at the battle of Jena.
When he had learned that I was fresh from the school at Fontainebleau, he made a wry face and said:
"My lieutenant died yesterday."
I understood that he meant to imply: "You ought to take his place, and you are not capable of it."—(Merimee, The Taking of the Redoubt.)
The story is thus set forth unmistakably as a tale of warfare, with stirring action promised. The first paragraph is purely superfluous. An author of to-day would not feel it necessary to
explain how the tale came to be. The pretence of plausibility is too thin, and adds nothing
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the river was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
. . . The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.
And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white
changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.
Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes," followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the seas. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled— the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus andTerror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from
Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; King's ships and the ships of the men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters of gold or pursuers of fame, they had all gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the, clouds. We live in the flicker— may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!
But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d'ye call 'em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. . . . Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed around him,—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him The fascination of the abomination— you know Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."—(Conrad, Heart of Darkness.)
This story, it is true, has no connection with England save as England, a civilized country, contrasts with the Congo. The story has to do with that contrast and is largely descriptive. The introduction is, therefore, in character. The story is, moreover, long, though structurally like a short story, and its introduction is in proportion.
This type of story, that concerned with background primarily, is rather rare in English literature, and appropriate illustrations are consequently few. Descriptive story openings of a purely conventional sort are, of course, common enough.
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree ofacumenwhich appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and es
sence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.—(Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.)
This is but the first paragraph of Poe's story. There follow several more in a like strain. The story itself, though exciting enough, is chiefly interesting to the author for its underlying idea. Hence his long analytical introduction—too long perhaps for many readers.
Kipling's handling of the same method is well illustrated in this from Thrown Away:
To rear a boy under what parents call the "sheltered life system" is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand he has to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper proportions of things
Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly-blacked boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that blacking and Old Brown Windsor make him very sick; so he argues that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs' ears. Being young, he remembers, and goes abroad, at six months, a well mannered little beast with a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away from boots, and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with developed teeth, just consider how fearfully sick
and thrashed he would be! Apply that notion to the "sheltered life" and see how it works. It does not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils.
There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the "sheltered life" theory; and the theory killed him dead. . . .—(Kipling, Thrown Away.)
The passage is illustrative of Kipling's so- called journalistic method, which he employs often in his earlier stories. It is, in brief, this: to announce at the outset the story theme, its essential fact, and then to elaborate it. The method resembles that of the newspaper "story" in so far as a newspaper seeks to give the essence of the news in the first paragraph, and to expand or retell this in succeeding paragraphs. Of course the writer does not give his story away so far that it no longer excites our interest. Rather is our curiosity aroused to see the development of the theme announced, as in a symphony the early announcement of a motif does not detract from but rather enhances the pleasure which we take in its elaboration.
We may, then, summarize briefly. In the introduction the story may do one of several things• it may begin with exposition rather than introduce this later at the risk of retarding the story-action; or it may at once indicate its
character (this may be done to some extent even in exposition) by beginning in a fashion characteristic of the theme: if a story of action, with action; if of character, with dialogue, analysis, or personal description; if a story of place, with description; or if concerned with an abstract idea, with a generalization. There is no rule other than this: a good writer indicates as soon as he can, the kind of story which he has to tell.
THE OPENING OF THE STORY
Well begun is half done.— OLD PROVERB.
The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.—PASCAL, Thoughts.
Most people have a very strong impulse to preface something in particular by at least a paragraph of nothing in particular, bearing to the real matter in hand a relation not more inherently intimate than that of the tuning of violins to a symphony. It is the mechanical misfortune of musicians that they, cannot with certainty tune their instruments out of hearing. It is the mechanical luck of the writer that he need not show a bit more of his work than he chooses.—BARRETT WENDELL, English Composition.
All stories must have beginnings, but not all beginnings should be introductions. The fiction writer's immediate concern is to get a picture quickly and clearly set in the mind's eye of the reader — to establish the reader in a way of thinking or a way of feeling. How he shall go about this depends solely upon the nature of the story and the impression he wishes to make. The reader may require the knowledge of some fundamental facts before he can take in the details of the picture, and that means introducing the story more or less formally. Upon the other hand — the better hand, as I think thestory may be such that the reader should be plunged into
the action at once. Between these extremes lie all sorts and gradations.
I. THE BEST USAGE
For this inquiry I have examined and broadly classified the openings of six hundred short-stories, including tales and sketches of the short-story type. The list takes in what critics and public regard as the world's greatest stories. The authors selected are nearly all well-known, and in most instances famous. Practically all the stories were written within the last seventy-five years, and a large majority since 187o. American stories preponderate, with French, British, German, Russian, Italian, Scandinavian, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, and minor nationalities following in about the order named. Current fiction has been given due regard as compared with the short-story of the period preceding 187o. Altogether, the investigation seems well calculated to give us a fair view of how approved story-tellers begin their narratives.
It must be noted that many introductions — I now use the word as broadly covering the beginning of a story, whether the author formally introduces the setting or plunges directly into the thick of the action —exhibit more than one purpose. For example, in giving initial prominence to a character some details of the setting are often worked in; or, in electing to give the setting first, the author is likely at the same time to touch upon some character of the story. In attempting this classification
the predominating phase of the introduction has been taken as determining its class.
I. Stories That Open With Dialogue
There is a general impression that a considerable number of short-stories begin in this manner. The actual proportion is surprisingly small, though the usage of the last ten years tends moderately in that direction, particularly among writers who produce fiction of the light and " clever " kind.
Of the six hundred stories examined, only fifty-one — less than ten per cent.— were found to begin with conversation, and these were rarely stories of great merit. Observe, however, that conversation occurs very early in a large proportion of the total number of stories examined.
These fifty-one stories may be grouped in five subdivisions :
(a) Twenty-six use the opening dialogue to give the setting.1In the term " setting " are included the surroundings in which the action begins, the mood which dominates the situation, and the conditions under which the story opens. It may be compared to the scene which meets the eye when the curtain rises on the stage. As we see in the following example, the characters appear even while the stage is being set, and this on account of the dialogue form.
"MANY WATERS "
"Well?"
"True bill; I'm awfully sorry."
Thomas Fleming took his cigar out of his mouth, and contemplated the lighted end. He did not speak. The other man, his lawyer, who had brought him the unwelcome news, began to make the best of it.
" Of course, it's an annoyance; but —"
" Well, yes. It's an annoyance," Fleming said, dryly.
Bates chuckled. " It strikes me, Tom, considering the difference between this and the real thing, that 'annoyance' is just the right word to use."
Fleming leaned over and knocked offthe ashes into his waste basket. He was silent.
" As for Hammond, he won't have a leg to stand on. I don't know what Ellis and Grew meant by letting him take the case before the Grand Jury. He won't have a leg to stand on 1 "
" Give me a light, will you, Bates? This cigar has gone out again."
Note how deftly the setting is conveyed by dialogue — a lawyer and his client are seated discussing the latter's indictment for an offense against the law. The lawyer's attitude and that of the client, their estimate of the case, and the names of their opponents, are all quickly brought before the reader. The situation made this handling possible. Few situations can be opened up in the same manner. You may read through a number of magazines without finding a single short-story of distinction, as " Many Waters " certainly is, which opens with a conversation.
(b)Twelve use the opening dialogue to delineate the characters. That is, the emphasis is placed on the characters rather than on the atmosphere in which they move — an easier performance always than that accomplished by Mrs. Deland.
THE AFFAIR OF THE BROWNS 3
"Ah " cried Wilberton, sitting up straight in his chair on the year-round resort hotel veranda. "Here is where Dull Monotony packs his things and hikes from the seaside."
"I should like to know why," commented Mrs. Wilberton skeptically. "I am sure nothing has occurred —"
" Well, something will occur very shortly," her husband assured her. "Why," he exclaimed, "things simply cannot be quiescent with a woman as pretty as that in their midst."
He nodded. Mrs. Wilberton, letting her gaze follow the direction of the nod, saw a young woman following the valise- encumbered porter toward the hotel entrance. She was a tall young woman, and slender, and her tan traveling gown was unquestionably in the latest style. By the hand she held a very small boy who was having great trouble with a very large straw hat.
" Your taste in women is constantly changing," Mrs. Wilber- ton averred in a tone which plainly conveyed her contempt for such inconsistency. Mrs. Wilberton was fat, and she was not tall, and her eyes were not gray. " Since when —"
" Oh, I always liked them tall and slender! "
" This one is positively thin!"
"And with dark hair and big gray eyes!"
"One can never be sure about hair."
" And clear, clean complexion, free of drugstore blush —"
"It is certainly absurd to regard that complexion as real, or pretty, or even artistically done.And anyhow it will not last two days in this sun and sea breeze."
" She walks well, a sort of queenly gait —"
"Very carefully studied from some second-rate actress, I dare
say — not at all natural, and decidedly — er —indolent."
" She doesn't seem to be very enthusiastic," agreed Wilberton.
(c) Nine use the opening dialogue to suggest the spirit of the story. The two openings which follow will make this clear.
A CASE OF IDENTITY'
" My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either
side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, " life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind of man can invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outréresults, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale and unprofitable."
THE BLAST OF THE TRUMPET 5
" De daid," asserted Aunt Janty Gibbs solemnly, " con-tin-wally do walk."
" Does dey walk all tuh wunst?" inquired her grandson, Gabriel Gibbs, a youth with an unquenchable thirst for information on all subjects.
" No, chile," returned his grandmother with a superior air, " dey walks sometimes in twos an' sometimes in threes, but mos'ly dey walks alone in de night-time."
"Dey's a time comin', Aun' Janty, when dey's all gwine tuh walk tuh wunst," remarked Brother Eli Wiggins with conviction.
" Whut yo' tuh, Brothah Wiggins, whut yo"ludin'
tuh?" asked Aunt Janty as she hospitably replenished his cup, while Gabriel improved the opportunity to slip, unnoticed from the room.
"Dey's a time comin'," he replied, pouring the steaming tea into his saucer, " when ole Gabriel am gwine tuh soun' de note on he hawn good an' loud. Den de graves am gwine tuh bus' open an' de daid come fo'th tuh walk up an' down in de worl', tuh an' fro in hit. Y-a-a-s, Aun' Janty, dat's so."
Brother Wiggins paused and looked solemnly at his hostess" Aun' Janty," he said, his voice sinking to a sepulchral whisper, " dat time ain' so fuh off ez mos' folks b'lieves."
In this latter story, the opening dialogue, while giving us the spirit of the story, both sets the stage and brings on the characters.
Two use the opening dialogue to lead up to the story proper by fact or explanation. This form is in fact a true introduction, yet only two stories out of the six hundred examined begin with dialogue used for this purpose. As for a reason, the style is antiquated. Writers prefer to pack preliminary statements into a few concise sentences rather than burden the dialogue with explanations which are as unnatural in the mouths of the characters as are similar " information speeches " on the lips of actors in " Act I. Scene I " of the ordinary play. A stronger reason for discarding this old form is that the crisp modern short-story does not begin in the past, but on the very threshold of the plot, if not in the middle, as one magazine editor used to put it.
Two use the opening dialogue solely to win attention. This seems like a waste of good type and paper. Besides, it is difficult enough to start a conversation brilliantly and yet make it naturally lead up to something else, without making epigrams solely to gain a reading. The brilliant talk which opens one and another of Anthony Hope's Dolly Dialogues is never mere fireworks, but is full of delicate light and heat.
Think how fearful of his story Wilhelm Hauff must have been when he essayed to catch the reader by this transparent introduction; yet he had a good story to
tell.
THE SINGER 6
"It is a strange occurrence, truly," said Councillor Bolnau to a friend whom he met on Broad Street in B. " You must confess that this is a queer age we live in."
"You mean the affair in the North?" answered his friend. "Have you important news, councillor? Has your friend, the foreign minister, told you some important secret of state?"
" Oh, don't bother me with politics or state secrets; let them go as they may. I mean now the affair of Mademoiselle Bianetti."
To sum up : Of the fifty-one stories that begin with dialogue, one-half devote the opening conversation to the setting, one-fourth to characterization, less than one- fifth to giving the spirit of the story, and one-twenty-fifth each to introductory facts and to an effort to cajole the reader's attention. The conversational opening is not so common as is supposed. Many stories will be found, however, in which the conversation begins in the second or third paragraph. The dialogue opening is the most difficult one to do well, and the easiest to do badly.
2. Stories That Open Without Dialogue
Five hundred and forty-nine stories of the six hundred which were classified belong under this grouping. This
clearly shows that expert writers regard the opening sentences of a story as of the highest value. They realize that they must compress into a few words the essence of all that the reader ought to know in order to take up the story with intelligent interest. This is the sense in which the word " introduction " applies to the short- story of to-day. The usage of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne was generally more leisurely than that of present- day masters (though they displayed occasional examples of rapid openings), for the short-story has progressed, in some regards, since the days of its perfecters, and in no respect more than in its introductions. Seldom nowadays does one find the long and irrelevant opening sentences which were tolerated a generation ago. It is true, by this compression the reader loses some finer touch6s, some detail, some reflective temper, some flights of fantasy, but for these he goes to the novel, and looks to the short-story for those illuminating flashes of word and phrase so rarely found in the longer fictional form. The novelist takes time to be lengthy, the short-story writer takes time to be brief. " Smith," says he, " I want you to know my brother Jack," and the introduction is accomplished, not without thought, not without painstaking, but withal briefly.
Remembering always that several sorts often overlap, therefore not analyzing too minutely, I subdivide the five hundred and forty-nine stories into seven groups, according to the purposesdisclosed by their beginnings.
.(a) Two hundred and seven open by giving the setting, often including a glimpse of the characters.
I have said that the word " setting " includes the surroundings in which the action begins,7the mood which dominates the situation, the conditions under which the story opens. It is less concerned with who 's who than with what 's what, and why.
EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELIYS VISIT TO
HEAVENS
TAKEN FROM HIS OWN MS. BY " MARX TWAIN "
Well, when I had been dead about thirty years, I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, I had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet.Like a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there wam't any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a brush together. But it was generally pretty one-sided, because I sailed by them the same as if they were standing still. An ordinary comet don't make more than about zoo,000 miles a minute. Of course when I came across one of that sort —like Encke's and Halley's comets, for instance—it warn't anything but just a flash and a vanish, you see. You couldn't rightly call it a race. It was as if the comet was a gravel-train, and I was a telegraph dispatch. But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I used to flush a comet occasionally that was something like. We haven't got any such comets — ours don't begin.
And then follows the first incident of the story.
Of another sort, yet also establishing the setting, are these opening lines of Dr. Watson's story.
A DOCTOR OF THE OLD SCHOOL'
BY " IAN MACLAREN "
A GENERAL PRACTITIONER
Drumtochty was accustomed to break every law of health, except wholesome food and fresh air, and yet had reduced the psalmist's furthest limit to an average life-rate. Our men made no difference in their clothes for summer or winter, Drumsheugh and one of the larger farmers condescending to a top-coat on Sabbath as a penalty of their position, and without regardto temperature. They wore their blacks at a funeral, refusing to cover them with anything, out of respect to the deceased, and standing longest in the kirkyard when the north wind was blowing across a hundred miles of snow. If the rain was pouring at the junction, then Drumtochty stood two minutes longer through sheer native dourness till each man had a cascade from the tail of his coat, and hazarded the suggestion, half-way to Kildrummie, that it had been " a bit scrowie," a " scrowie " beingas far short of a " shoor " as a " shoor " fell below " weet."
Here is another variety of the same general sort.
THE PHILOSOPHER IN THE APPLE ORCHARD 10
BY "ANTHONY HOPE"
It was a charmingly mild and balmy day. The sun shone beyond the orchard and the shade was cool inside. A light breeze stirred the boughs of the old apple tree under which the philosopher sat. None of these things did the philosopher notice, unless it might bewhen the wind blew about the leaves of the large volume on his knees, and he had to find his place again. Then he would exclaim against the wind, shuffle the leaves till he got the right page, and settle to his reading.The book was a treatise on ontology; it was written by another
philosopher, a friend of this philosopher's; it bristled with fallacies, and this philosopher was discovering them all, and noting them on the fly-leaf at the end. He was not going to review the book (as some might have thought from his behaviour), or even to answer it in a work of his own. It was just that he found a pleasure in stripping any poor fallacy naked and crucifying it.
Then comes the girl and, with her, the story.
A few lines suffice for some writers to fill in the bold outlines of the setting, the rest comes as the story goes on.
AT THE NEGATIVE POLE"
BY VAN TASSEL SUTPHEN
Thursday being the first of November and All Saints' day, Miss Belden had attended the vesper services at S. Saviour's. On her way home across the Park she encountered Innsley. She stopped and shook hands cordially, for it had been several months since they had met.
(b) One hundred thirty-eight open with character delineation, often adding a suggestion of the setting. Of these a large number begin with the pronoun " He," or " She."
It is not difficult to discern why so many writers should elect to begin their narratives by painting in the setting, and why character- drawing should come first with only a slightly smaller number. Setting and characters are the picturesque elements in fiction, and it is inevitable that the two — one or the other predominating, or both standing on a level — should be present first and last in the author's vision. It is this selfsame vision
that the reader must be made to see, and what way so clear and so direct as the opening words of the story.
In the following introduction (in the whimsical style of Irving, but not up to that standard) we have a typical example of the character opening.
AN INSPIRED LOBBYIST
BY J. W. DE FOREST
A certain fallen angel (politeness toward his numerous and influential friends forbids me to mention his name abruptly) lately entered into the body of Mr. Ananias Pullwool, of Washington, D. C.
As the said body wasacapacious one, having been greatly enlarged circumferentially since it acquired its full longitude, there was accommodation in it for both the soul of Pullwool himself (it was a very little one) and for his distinguished visitant. Indeed, there was so much room in it that they never crowded each other, and that Pullwool hardly knew, if he so much as mistrusted, that there was a chap in with him. But other people must have been aware of this double tenantry, or at least must have been shrewdly suspicious of it, for it soon became quite common to hear fellows say, " Pullwool has got the Devil in him."
Compare the triteness of the following introduction — always Dr. Doyle's difficult spot — with the freshness of Mr. Hewlett's opening paragraph, the next specimen.
THE MYSTERY OF SASASSA VALLEY 13
BY A. CONAN DOYLE
Do I know why Tom Donahue is called "Lucky Tom"? Yes, I do; and that is more than one in ten of those who call
him so can say. I have knocked about a deal in my time, and seen some strange sights, but none stranger than the way in which Tom gained that sobriquet, and his fortune with it. For I was with him at the time. Tell it? Oh, certainly; but it is a longish story and a very strange one; so fill up your glass again, and light another cigar while I reel it off. Yes, a very strange one; beats some fairy stories I have heard; but it's true, sir, every word of it.
THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO "
BY MAURICE HEWLETT
It is happily as unnecessary as it would be unwise to inquire into the ancestry of Bellaroba, a meek-eyed Girl of Venice, with whom I have some concern. Her mother was La Fragiletta, of the Old Ghetto, and her father may have been of the Council of Ten, or possibly a Doge. No one could deny it, for no one knew his name. It is certain that his daughter was not christened as she was called, equally certain that the nickname fitted her. Bella roba,a pretty thing, she always had been for her mother's many friends; belles roba in truth she looked, as La Fragiletta fastened her dark red dress, stuck a bunch of carnations in the bosom of it, and pulled up the laces around her slim neck, on a certain May morning in or about the year 1469. " The shape you are, child," said that industrious woman, " I can do nothing for you in Venice. It is as timid as a nun's. Ferrara is the place of all the world for you. I look forward to your speedy establishment in a city where a girl inay be like a flagstaff and yetnot be thought amiss."
(c) Seventy-six open directly with incident. No preliminary intaking of the breath, no pause to tighten the belt, not even a " here we go," but just a swift rush ahead. That is typical short-story form, toward which usage is markedly tending and in which writers are
showing increasing skill. It follows the dictum of Horace, to plunge at once into the action.
What become of both setting and character delineation? Subtly interwoven as the story moves rapidly on — portraiture in one sure stroke, background in another, atmosphere in a third. Not all stories can be told in this fashion, but those that are, and told well, lay hold of the attention with a nervous grip. The difficulty lies in making the narrative keep the hold. But, difficulty or no difficulty, there is no phase of the story-teller's art which so richly repays labor as does the rapid introduction. The beginner loves his phrases. They grew in sweat and pain. But he must learn the drastic art of amputation and learn it by practising on his own stories. Perhaps the editor does not appreciate how heroic is the author who carves and slices and pares until only the compact, firm, flesh-and-blood story appears on the well-typed page, but at all events he rejoices when he meets that kind ofmanuscript
DOYLE'S bEBUT15
BY PORTER EMERSON BROWNE
Leading the girl to a corner of the crowded little parlor where a three-legged sofa leaned weakly against the wall, Doyle seated himself tentatively upon it and motioned with spread palm at the vacancy beside him.
" Si'.down, Maggie," he invited; and the tall, slender-waisted, high-pompadoured girl before him did so.
" Aw, say, Maggie," continued Doyle, as he endeavored, unsuccessfully, to hold her hand beneath a fold of skirt, "why
don' yuh marry me and cut out sellin' stockin's to a bunch o' fussy dames that don' know what they wants, an' wouldn' buy it if they did? I'm gittin' eighteen seventy-five now ; an' two can live on that. . . . Wha' d' yuh wan' tuh be worryin' yuhself with a job fer?"
Alphonse Daudet is a master of all sorts of introductions. A study ofLetters From My Mill and Monday Taleswill be a profit and a delight. The following is from the latter volume.
THE LITTLE PIES
That morning, which was a Sunday, Sureau, the pastry-cook on Rue Turenne, called his apprentice and said to him:
" Here are Monsieur Bonnicar's little pies; go and take them to him and come back at once. It seems that the Versaillais have entered Paris."
The little fellow, who understood nothing about politics, put the smoking hot pies in the dish, the dish in a white napkin, and balancing the whole upon his cap, started off on a run for Ile St. Louis, where M. Bonnicar lived.
Then follows that charming blending of atmosphere and incident so characteristic of the author.
LITTLE SOLDIER
BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT
Every Sunday, as soon as they were at liberty, the two little soldiers would set forth.
They would turn to the right on leaving the barracks, march rapidly through Courbevoie as if they were out for drill; then, as soon as they had left the houses behind, they would follow at a more quiet pace the bare and dusty high-road that leads to Bezons.
Here we have in sixty-four words the first step in the incident, the characters, and the atmosphere.
•(d)Fifty-five open with the facts, events, or motives, which lead up to the story proper. These are real, old- fashioned introductions, modified by the new short-story spirit of brevity.
The how-I-came-to-tell-this-story beginning belongs to this class — a device which rarely interests the reader, because it is so palpable an attempt to storm his confidence. Yet the masters use this opening now and then with singular effectiveness. One class of errors, however, they uniformly avoid: introductions containing many or complex facts, events, or motives.
Occasionally a popular writer seems to be so sure of his audience that he ventures upon a start which would not be tolerated in a beginner's manuscript, unless the latter told his story as skilfully as the former. Compare this labored commencement of a really good yarn, with Daudet's ingenious use of an old device. .
THE FOUR-FIFTEEN EXPRESS "
BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS
The events which I am about to relate took place between nine and ten years ago. Sebastopol had fallen in the early spring, the peace of Paris had been concluded since March, our commercial relations with the Russian empire were but recently renewed; and I, returning home after my first northward journey since the war, was well pleased with the prospect of spending the
month of December under the hospitable and thoroughly English roof of my excellent friend, Johnathan Jelf, Esq., of Dumbleton Manor, Clayborough, East Anglia.
With more of the same unnecessary sort.
THE CURE OF CUCUGNAN
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET
Every year, at Candlemas, the Provencal poets publish at Avignon a merry little book filled to the covers with fine verses and pretty tales. Last year's has just reached me, and I find in it a delicious fabliau, which I am going to try to translate for you, shortening it a little. Hold out your sacks, Parisians. It is the very cream of Provencal flour that I am going to serve you this time.
Here is another from the same fascinating Mill.
THE POPE'S MULE
Of all the clever sayings, proverbs, or saws with which ourProvence peasants embellish their discourse, I know of none more picturesque or more peculiar than this. Within a radius of fifteen leagues of my mill, when anybody mentions a spiteful, vindictive man, he will say: " Look out for that man he is like the Pope's mule, that keeps her kick for seven years."
I tried for a long time to find out the source of that proverb, what that Papal mule might be, and that kick kept for seven years. No one here was able to give me any information on that subject, not even Francet Mamai, my fife-player, who, however, has the whole legendary history of Provence at his finger- ends. Francet agrees with me that there is probably some old tradition of Provence behind it; but he has never heardit mentioned except in the proverb.
`Yea wont laid that axywhere except in the Grasshoppers* Library,-said the aid fifer, with a hush.
I thought r c s-Agestion a good erne. and as the Grasshoppers• LE3rary isr:ert at my door, I shut myself up there for a week.
Notice how this introduction infallibly hints the mood of the story. Nervous or placid, gay or pathetic, grotesque or gloomy, the genuine beginning will suggest the spirit of the narrative.
(e) Thirty-four open with some general truth with is illustrated in thestory. When the truth is well put no beginning could be more pleasing.
THE GOAT OF MONSIEUR SEGUIN le
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET
To M. Pierre Gringoire, Lyrical Poet at Paris.
You will always be the same, my poor Gringoire
Think of it! you are offered the place of reporter on a respectable Paris newspaper, and you have the assurance to refuse! Why, look at yourself, unhappy youth! Look at that worn-out doublet, those dilapidated breeches, that gaunt face, which cries aloud that it is hungry. And this is where your passion for rhyme has brought you! this is the result of your ten years of loyal service among the pages of my lord Apollo! Aren't you ashamed, finally?
Be a reporter, you idiot; be a reporter! You will earn honest crowns, you will have your special seat at Brebant's, and you will be able to appear every first night with a new feather in your cap.
No? You will not? You propose to remain perfectly free to the end? Well! just listen to the story of Monsieur Seguin's goat. You will see what one gains by attempting to remain free.
Lucretia P. Hale begins her fantastic sketch, " The Spider's Eye,"20by enlarging upon the fact that whispering galleries exist. The chief character finds a spot in a theatre where all sounds, down to the slightest whisper, converge, and the strange things thus overheard make up the narrative.
" The Tale of a Goblin Horse," 21by Charles C. Nott, begins with a generalization. " Horses are like babies — chiefly interesting to their owners. Occasionally they emerge from tile enclosure of home life, and become interesting to other people. One in a million may find his way into print, but most rare are the horses whose charactersare worthy of record."
Sometimes these observations show a fine insight into human nature :
" Boys who are born in a small town are born free and equal," are the opening words of William Allen White's " The King of Boyville." 22
"(f) Eighteen open with expressions chiefly designed to attract attention. Here are three examples :
" The distinguishing trait of Grubbins was his unexpectedness. Grubbins was Dikkon's dog." 23
" No man will ever know the exact truth of this story ; though women may sometimes whisper it to one another after a dance, when they are putting up their hair for the night and comparing lists of victims."
" This is the history of a Failure ; but the woman who failed said it might be an instructive tale to put into print for the benefit of the younger generation. The younger generation does not want instruction. It is perfectly willing to instruct if any one will listen to it. None the less, here begins the story where every right-minded story should begin, that is to say, at Simla, where all things begin and many come to an evil end." 25
(g) Fifteen open with words about the character who afterwards tells the story in the first person. It takes either unusual ability or an unusual story to carry the weight of so timeworn a device. More " horrible examples " are herded into this corral than into any other. Kipling does this sort of opening better than his contemporaries, standing almost alone in excellence26-•but occasionally even he comes to grief.
In " Long Odds," one of Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain stories," two-thirds of the seven-hundred word introduction is wasted in irrelevancies. One wonders how even Daudet makes a success of this old device in " Master Cornille's Secret," 28but he does, and imparts an air of truth, to boot. Would an editor to-day pass the following introduction?
" Francet Mamai, an old fifer, who comes sometimes to pass the evening with me and drink mulled wine, told me the other evening of a little village drama which my mill witnessed some twenty years ago. The good man's story impressed me, and I propose to try to tell it to you as I heard it.
"Imagine for a moment, dear readers, that you are seated before a jar of perfumed wine, and that it is an old fifer who is speaking."
• Instances of this sort rebuke the critic, and show how futile it is to call all things bad which conform to a given type. This introduction is good in spite of its form, not because of it — if we must now and again have recourse to a reason which is not altogether a reason.
There yet remain to be accounted for six stories of the six hundred. This one per cent. I have labeled " unclassified," because their openings show marks of such varied character. One is a prologue of unwarranted length." Another a preface." A third, which shall be nameless, is a hodge-podge of every possible sort, introducing by name no less than fifteen characters in the first paragraph! In the fourth, Kipling si makes a native tell a story in the first person and the reader finds it out from the mere manner of the telling. The openings of the last two are quite nondescript.
IL BAD USAGE.
I shall not refer again to the forms which invite disaster, as just noted. In opening your story :
Don't be pert.
Don't be lengthy.
Don't be general.
Don't be garrulous.
Don't be roundabout.
Don't describe when you can suggest.
Don't be heavy, pompous, or too serious.
Don't tell the reader what he can imagine.
Don't be content with a commonplace opening. Don't think that sincere simplicity is commonplace.
Don't let the introduction weight down or overshadow
the story.
Don't strike one note in the introduction and another in the body of the story.
Don't touch anything which is not a live wire leading direct to the real centre of the story.
OUTLINE SUMMARY
THE OPENING OF THE STORY
I. THE BEST USAGE (SIX HUNDRED STORIES EXAMINED).
I. Fifty-one Open With Dialogue
Twenty-six Use Dialogue to Give the Setting
Twelve to Delineate Characters
Nine to Suggest the Spirit of the Story
Two to Supply Preliminary Explanations (e) Two to Win the Reader's Attention
2. Five Hundred Forty-nine Open Without Dialogue
Two Hundred seven Open With the Setting
One Hundred Thirty-eight With Character Delineation
Seventy-six With Incident
Fifty-five With Introductory Facts
.(e) Thirty-four With General Truths Illustrated by the Stories
Eighteen With Expressions Designed to Win Attention
Fifteen With Words About the Secondar4Narrator
(h) Six Miscellaneous
ILBAD USAGE
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES FOR CLASS OR
INDIVIDUAL STUDY
Non: Select any plots you please from Appendix C as bases for the following work. The instructor may vary these assignments indefinitely.
i. Write merely the introduction to a story, beginning with dialogue to give the setting.
Another, opening with dialogue to delineate a character.
Another, using dialogue to lead up to the story proper by fact or explanation.
Another, beginning without dialogue, giving the setting.
Another, introducing acharacter.
Another, opening directly with incident.
Another, with facts or explanations which lead,up to the story proper.
Rewrite one of the dialogue introductions given in this chapter, without the use of introductory dialogue.
Rewrite another of the introductions, recasting it in dialogue form.
1o. Do the same with your own writings, as assigned above.
THE OPENING OF THE short STORY
In so brief a piece of work as the short-story, the first impression and the last are of supreme importance, and there is little opportunity to redeem a bad beginning. Here the reader's taste must be consulted, rather than the author's ease. The story must begin where it has some interest, even if it would have been more convenient to begin somewhere else.
-EVELYN MAY ALBRIGHT,The Short-Story.
A good first impression is half the battle. The opening of your story is like the introduction of one friend to another, and opens the way to interesting things to come.
r. Where to Begin
The tale-writers usually began at the beginning, if not ages and ages before the beginning, and after a more or less long- winded introduction — which could just as well as not be skipped — they arrived at the story-part of their narratives. Even Irving, who wrote at the transition period between the tale and the short-story, revelled in long introductions, and sometimes, as we have seen, in introductions to the introductions. Hawthorne, not a generation later, made a stride in advance by generally beginning at the beginning; but Poe, the radical, the innovator, turned everything upside down by very often beginning in the middle, or even at the end. An examination of several of Poe's plots will illustrate his varied methods.
"The Purloined Letter" begins in the middle. The Prefect of Police, in a difficulty, seeks the aid of Monsieur
Dupin, the detective after whom so many later sleuths of crime have been modeled. In the conversation that follows, the reader is gradually told the story up to the point where the author's narrative began. A letter has been stolen, the thief is known, the motive for the theft is evident, the consequences threaten to be distrous, so far.the search has been fruitless — all this is told quite fully. The story then proceeds more rapidly to its elhnox, which is the presentation of the purloined letter to the astonished Prefect. Lastly, by a kind of double-back-action in the denouement, or untying of the tangle, the reader is told the precise method of reasoning the detective pursued and how the letter was obtained.
"A Descent Into the Maelstrom" begins at the end, at the final consequence. A man has been physically wrecked by a horrible experience. Then he relates the experience, retracing his steps, so to say, for the benefit of the reader. Similarly, in "The Cask of Amontillado," we are at once introduced to a man who gloats over a satisfied revenge. The story of the vengeance is then told, in direct order of incidents, just like a tale.
"If Poe had written 'Rip Van Winkle'," says the Edgar Allen Poe professor of English in the University of Virginia,1"he would have inverted the sequence of the story. He would have begun with Rip's return from the mountain. He would have directed the reader's attention, first of all, to the mysterious problem presented by the sudden emergence of a stranger who did not know that the Revolutionary War had been fought."
The advantage of beginning in the middle or at the end is that the reader is at once introduced to a dramatic crisis, so that his curiosity is immediately aroused and stimulated, whereas first to lay all the foundation of the plot in full view of the reader often proves to be a sleeping potion. To present the complication at once is the method used in detective stories. The disadvantage of this procedure, in perhaps all but detective stories, lies in the difficulty of sustaining interest while working back to the beginning, for the author has risked all upon the reader's deep desire to learn the outcome, and counts on this to hold interest in the meanwhile.
But in whatever part of the plot the story opens, the first and chief commandment for the short-story writer of today is to waste no time in beginning With this commandment written in his heart, he is free to choose the where and the how to open his story.
2. How to Begin
Itis good to begin with the setting of the story. A comparison of the narratives classified as short-stories which were published in the Atlantic,the Century, Harper's, Scribner's, andLippincott'smagazines in the first volume of 1912 — covering six issues — shows that about four- tenths of these stories open with the setting. In other words, the reader is at once, and as a rule swiftly, given the environment, whether material or spiritual — the time, place, local color, weather conditions, and mood or mental atmosphere, which form the background of the narrative and interpenetrate its framework.
THE LADY OF THE GARDEN'
The moonlight drifted down through the orchard, flooding the garden with dreamy radiance. It was a young moonlight, and its quality was mystic and ethereal, visions lurked in it.
A SCION OF ADAM'
Do you know Poketown? Have you ever driven through its one long, straggling street, guiding your horse carefully that you may avoid injuring the speckled hens and the pielenninnies that luxuriate promiscuously in the dust of the public highway?
THE UNSUCCESSFUL ALUMNUS'
The dinner was a long one. There were songs between the courses, and the courses were many. The banquet hall was gay with light and color. The class of 1898 was proud of its college spirit and class loyalty. This was 1908, but there were few empty chairs at the long table. The toasts were beginning at last. The master of ceremonies arose, bland and smiling, to present the first speaker.
The device of mingling a bit of dialogue with the setting, or of giving the setting by means of dialogue instead of direct description, or of mingling dialogue, setting, and a touch of characterization, will often enhance the interest of the opening. Such devices may be studied in the following examples:
A TRANSFORMATION SCENE"
"Keep her right on — right on!" said the skipper to the man at the wheel, just glancing back at the compass, and then back again at the waves that struck heavily against the port bow andBung the trawler's nose high out of water, letting her down with a splash of white foam into the trough.
" Right on it is," repeated the man methodically.
STRAIGHT GOLF
"Beastly of you, Pritchard, to keep us in town on a day like this!" puffed Darragh, that fattest and fussiest of the directors, as he plumped into a chair near the window, and mopped his face on one of the three clean handkerchiefs with which he provided himself in sultry weather.
"Too bad, Darragh! — How are you, Kent? — I fancy we are all in the same boat as to not liking the city to-day."
"I wish I werein a boat!" said McGlade, mournfully.
THE MIRACLE
"It's the Second National! Mr. Steams wishes to speak with you," said the stenographer, in a low tone, pushing the instrument across the desk toward her employer.
As Langdon took the receiver from her hand he glanced sharply at the woman; his eyes continued to study her face while he talked with the official of the bank.
"Yes, Langdon! — No, not today. — I'll call the first thing in the morning — I said the first thing in the morning!" His usual low, controlled telephone voice rose irritably at the last words, and he clanged the receiver on the instrument bruskly.
"We'll finish that letter now, Miss Condon," he said, and as he dictated the conventional business terms he was thinking. "Does she suspect? Of course, she must! How much does she know?"
A little more than two-tenths of the short-stories examined began by the direct introduction of one of the characters, sometimes the chief actor, sometimes the one who looked on. This method is time-saving, bringing the reader at once into the human relation — but it has some of the disadvantages of staging a play without scenery, for the figures, especially when introduced by direct description, may seem to be as detached from their environment as silhouettes.
RENTIN' HENS
Mr. Barnaby was the type of man who called women angels and treated them as fools. He seemed to feel that by doing the former he had done all that could be expected of him, and with this once off his conscience he could form his conduct more closely according to facts as he saw them.
Characterization is given in the next examples, but less directly than in the foregoing, and the setting is also well suggested.
THE BALANCE OF POWER
Joe Matson was not popular with his neighbors. He had had trouble with all of them every day for years. If Sam Peters' hogs found a defective panel of fence and foraged over in Matson's meadow, Matson promptly penned them up and demanded damages. If Silas Casey's turkeys strayed down the public road to Matson's barn and mingled with Matson's turkeys, they thereby were instantly amalgamated into Matson turkeys, and calmly claimed as such when Casey went for them.
THE MAN WHO FAILED
As Robert Brockton started across the bridge toward Brooklyn, he turned and glanced hopelessly at the sky-scrapers behind him. In the gathering darkness they loomed, huge symbols of the triumphant force of New York. Brockton shrank from them because he knew that he was a failure; a failure in this country of ambition, this city of success.
About three-tenths of the remaining short-stories could be divided pretty evenly between those that opened with an incident, and those that opened with dialogue. The remaining one-tenth opened in various fashions.
The rapid plunge into the plot, necessitated by opening with incident, secures interest at once, but calls for experience and skill in gradually introducing setting and characterization as the story progresses, without allowing interest to flag. Such a beginning implies courage to cut out — a virtue essential to authorship.
MARY FELICIA
When Larry Gordon came back to East Windsor to look at his grandfather's place, just inherited, and make up his mind about selling it, he found the little neighborhood in an uproar. Mary Felicia Blake had left her uncle's house, where she was the adopted daughter and "kindly treated," and walked fifteen miles on the road to running away.
The advantages of opening a story with dialogue are that it is interesting, for one always likes to hear what worth-while people have to say; and that it introduces the characters at once —it "hits them off," and reveals them directly. The disadvantages are that unless the actors deliver themselves of "information speeches" — and these are deadly if not very well handled — the writer will have to get down to his real introduction after he has brought his people on the stage,a palpable loss of time. This will have the effect of making them wait around while the writer speaksa piece himself. The reader will not like such an interruption after he has become interested in the folks, and no matter how interesting the writer tries to be in his solid paragraph, it will taste dry and flat — like a chunk of bread — after the fizz and sparkle of conversation.
THE FROG IN THE WELL
"Oh, how can I work with all this noise?" Elsa burst out, petulantly, after a prolonged scratching of pencil against paper.
" Why don't you take your work upstairs?" Mrs. Morgan asked.
"Oh, it's too quiet up there, mother," Elsa answered, discontent succeeding the petulance in her tone. "I feel lonesome away from everybody."
Here the relation between the speakers, and a good deal of the character of at least one of them, are quickly brought out. Two short paragraphs of setting follow.
In the following example it is what "Miss Ladd did not say" that gives the setting and the information, while apparently continuing the dialogue.
THE HOMELIEST CHILD'
"I want a pretty baby," Mrs. Thornton said, "about two years old — a happy, wholesome, healthy baby — and preferably a baby with golden curls — but above all a pretty baby."
Miss Ladd did not say: "You are asking, my dear lady, for exactly what everybody else asks. All babies can't be happy, wholesome, healthy, pretty, and golden-haired." In fact, she did not say any of the things that on these occasions invariably recurred to her. She had had charge of the State's orphans for five years, and had learned to suppress her college-bred freespokenness.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
r. Choose any brief, direct narrative and re-write it, beginning it in the middle or at the end —that is, invert, wholly or in part, the simple, direct sequence of incidents in the story.
Write original opening paragraphs for three stories designed to give the setting of (a) a congested district in a great city, (b) alonely country place, (c) colonial times, or ante-bellum times in the South.
Write three dialogue openings which shall both reveal character and give the setting.
Write two introductory paragraphs which shall introduce at once the chief character in the story.
Write several brief, dramatic incidents suitable for the introductory paragraphs of stories which shall open with incident.
Select two stories from the magazines and criticise the openings favorably or unfavorably.
Re-write the description of setting on page 167, by giving the same information in the form of conversation.
Reverse the process with "The Frog in the Well," on page 171.
Recast at least three openings taken from the magazines, striving to make them more interesting. Do not strainafter very new effects.
ro. Write the opening of an original short-story in any manner you prefer, saying why you chose the particular method you adopted.
I I. Give your opinion of the opening of "The Dub."