Raymond Carver: Great First Sentences

[MANICHAEAN]

I'd never really focused on the opening sentance before and found the exercise quite interesting. Ranged from the tersely cogent e.g.
"Mark Sanderson liked women." Frederick Forsyth "No Comebacks"
to real stage set pieces e.g.
"All the efforts of several hundred thousand people, crowded in a small space, to disfigure the land on which they lived; all the stone they covered it with to keep it barren; how so diligently every sprouting blade of grass was removed; all the smoke of coal and naphtha; all the cutting down of trees and driving off of cattle could not shut out the spring, even from the city." Count Leo Tolstol "The Awakening"

A few others that reflect so much the style of the author:

"I believe this is the first English country house you have stayed at Miss Worsley?" Oscar Wilde. " A Woman of No Importance"

"The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: "Philip Marlow...Investigations." Raymond Chandler "The Little Sister"

"At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds." Mikhail Bulgakov. "The Master and Margarita."

"Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours." Grahame Greene. "Brighton Rock"

"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead." (Sorry 3 sentances!) Henry Miller. "Tropic of Cancer."

"At five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blow of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters." Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

"I'm going to get that bloody bast-rd if I die in the attempt." James Clavell. "King Rat."

"We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk." Gustave Flaubert 'Madame Bovary."

A new game. Try using one of the listed authors and adapt their individual style to write one of the above from an opening sentence not their own!

[blp]

This thread is timely for me. I've been thinking about openings as I think about my own novel.

Blood and Guts in Highschool by Kathy Acker: 'Never having known a mother, her mother died when Janey was a year old, Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father.'

[Pecksie]

Regarding good first lines --- how about this one from the short story 'Adrift', by master storyteller Horacio Quiroga:

'The man stepped on something whitish, and immediately felt the bite in his foot'.

What follows is the snake-bitten man's desperate race against time, his attempt to reach the downriver town where he can get a doctor.

Here's a link I've found to the story in Spanish: http://www.ciudadseva.com/textos/cue...oga/deriva.htm

[Emil Miller]

An opening sentence is useful for setting the scene in which the action will unfold. I particularly like the following from The Octopus by Frank Norris; a story of the struggle of a farming community against the predation of a railroad company:

Just after passing Caraher's saloon, on the County Road that ran south from Bonneville, and that divided the Broderson ranch from that of Los Muertes, Presley was suddenly aware of the faint and prolonged blowing of a steam whistle that he knew must come from the railroad shops near the depot at Bonneville.


I have taken the liberty of giving below the opening sentence to my third, as yet untitled and uncompleted, novel:

A truism is no less true for having become a cliché and, as he looked across the Gulf of Salerno, the words resonated in Jerome Wakefield's brain: "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive."

[Travis_R]

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Anna Karenina.

[MANICHAEAN]

A few of the ones that stick in my head:

Camus. The Stranger: "My mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday."

Daphne Du Maurier. Rebecca: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

Anthony Burgess. Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

Rose Macaulay. The Towers of Trebizond. "Take my camel dear" said Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

[Pecksie]

Anthony Burgess. Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

[dmsynck]

Here are two of my favorites. Not Raymond Carver specifically, but still great nonetheless.

"It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." - George Orwell "1984"

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - William Gibson "Neuromancer"

[cyberbob]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife!

Come on, that's an obvious one.

[Mariner]

"Vera’s car was there, no others, and Burt gave thanks for that."

A Serious Talk, by Raymond Carver.

Re-read last night. He's among the best at it.


We talk a lot about first sentences on the newspaper. They are the single hardest parts to write and about the most important. A weak "lede" (first line) and you lose your reader, my editors always say. Nothing drives reporters crazy like crafting a suitable first sentence.

[laymonite]

I recently read Stanley Fish's newest book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. Interesting discussion of the first sentences power to shape everything that follows.

[Der Wegwerfer]

My husband just brought home the Friday Sept.11th edition of the Wall St. Journal. Lo and behold there is an article about Raymond Carver. Seems they are advertising a new 'Collected Stories" by R.C. that is now out in hardback, all 1,019 pages. This new collection allows you, for the first time, to read and compare Lish-edited selections with the original manuscripts by Carver. According to the WSJ article, Lish altered a great deal of Carver's works, even changing character names. From this article, it does seem like readers were scammed or duped, but at least now one can compare the two.

The title of the article is Before and After Stories
A reputation shaped by an editor's hand, but a legacy formed by a writer's maturation.

that edition is from the Library of America series and it includes the impassioned letter Carver sent to Lish imploring him to not change the stories. Fascinating reading.

I love Carver, one of the bests.

[Emil Miller]

I want to explain how a family, a small group of beings, behaves in a society, and flourishes by giving birth to ten to twenty individuals who appear, at first glance, profoundly dissimilar, but that analysis shows each one intimately bound to the others. Heredity, like gravity, has its laws.

This is the beginning of Emil Zola's, La Fortune des Rougon. The first in his epic twenty novel series about two French families under the Second Empire. It's a huge canvas comprising all aspects of life during that tumultuous period from Napoleon 111's coup d'etat of 1852 until the defeat of the French by the Germans in 1870.

[henriquefb]

I love this thread! Being a bad project of writer myself, I always grapple with first sentences, because if one is not careful, one's first sentence is always in a danger to look stupid.

Three first sentences come to my mind as I read this thread, one is already put here, from Camus' The Stranger:
"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas."
Also the first verse from Lattimore's Iliad:
"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus"
and also one from my favourite book, Grande Sertão: Veredas (a roughly intranslatable book from Brazilian author Guimarães Rosa, translated to English with the title "The Devil to pay in the backlands". It starts simply with:
"Nonada.", an inexistent word in formal portuguese which, from my reading, mean simply "no", but with MANY other semantic consequences. I love guimarães rosa.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Not familiar with Carver, but I'll offer a few opening lines I enjoy:

"The little town, as I recall it, was of just enough dignity and dearth of the same to be an ordinary county seat in Indiana - "The Grand Old Hoosier State," as it was ued to being howlingly referred to by the forensic stump orator from the old stand in the courthouse yard-a political campaign being the wildest delight that Zekesbury might ever hope to call its own."

James Whitcomb Riley At Zekesbury

"There was once upon a time...
'A King!' my little readers will instantly exclaim.
No, children, you are wrong. There was once upon a time a piece of wood."

Carlo Collodi - Pinocchios's Adventures in Wonderland

"The Christmas of 182__ was remarkable in Guernsey. It snowed on that day. In the Channel Islands, a winter where it freezes to the point of forming ice is memorable, and a snow is an event."
Victor Hugo Toilers of the Sea

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