Beginnings

Your beginning should pull the reader into what you’re writing about. Your reader will quit on you if what you have written is boring. You have at most the first page to do it in. 

Alice says we have to start at the beginning. Which beginning? Every story has two beginnings: the beginning of the story of whatever you’re telling, and the beginning of the piece that you are writing to tell the reader about it. Case in point, the Sound of Music, which whatever else it is, is writing.

The beginning of the story of Maria begins when she’s born a poor country Fraulein outside Salzburg, Austria. She grows up a problem child who won’t do what she’s told, which is probably why her parents send her to be a nun. We don’t see this; we just piece it together from later songs and dialogue.

The musical’s story begins as she’s about to be thrown out of the abbey. We first see her singing and frolicking around in a gorgeous Alpine field. And what glorious singing and frolicking and scenery it is. The story is pure fabrication, yet what wonderful fabrication.

Yet the movie begins with a glacially-paced overflight of the Alps before zooming in on Julie Andrews as Maria singing and frolicking. The overflight, besides revealing the beauty of the environment, really is pretty much of a waste of footage. Now don’t get me wrong. I love the Alps. I love seeing pictures of them. I love spending time in them, walking in them, traveling through them, hearing the sound of them, feel the warmth of their sun playing with their coolness of their breezes. To open this film, I wish they’d just zoomed in on Julie Andrews singing and frolicking. We know the beauty of that world because we get to tour the city and the mountains throughout the film.

Some writers start their stories at the end, then spend the rest of the time catching up. Some start in the middle. Historical accounts often start by telling the origins of whatever they’re writing about. I think fiction is well begun a third of the way in. In my latest novel, yet to be posted on this site, I began about 1% of the way in, because it’s very bloody, and I didn’t want to put some readers off right away. Some fiction writers take an exciting episode and put it up front. I have done that. But you can start anywhere if it works to move the reader. In In Cold Blood, which was the first real crime novel, Capote put the full horror of what the killers did almost tat the end. Readers wouldn’t have been ready for it earlier. These days, anything goes, pretty much.  

I wonder what The Sound of Music would have been like if the writers had begun the script with Maria and Georg getting married.  That happens about 2/3 of the way through film. Just remember, you can do anything as long as it works.

NEXT TIME: ENDINGS