What is the Perfect Opening Paragraph?

     As with most anything else related to writing, if you ask 100 different writers that question, you’ll probably get 300 different answers. A little over five years ago, Emily Temple wrote a highly republished article, and for good reason, about what she considered the best opening paragraph of all time, at least among novels she’d read. Her choice was the one from Shirley Jackson’s only horror novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  

     In it, Temple mines the 88 word paragraph of every meaning, nuanced or otherwise and makes a pretty good case of why this is the best opening paragraph ever written. And if it doesn’t meet that lofty standard, it at least makes a persuasive argument for the greatest amount of information packed into one paragraph. 

     Jackson’s paragraph is as follows: 

 

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”  

     I won’t try to one-up Temple and especially the late, great Jackson, who was surely one of the finest writers of the 20^th century.  

     Yet, I will venture that the point that Temple and Jackson were making is that the opening paragraph is the ideal vehicle, a springboard of sorts, from which to launch your narrative as well as introducing your character. 

     Then, after an abortive effort to do an audiobook, the details of which I won’t go into, I realized that I’d done much the same thing in the opening paragraph of my latest novel, Hollywoodland. By the time I’d finally settled on the current narrator, the incomparable Marnie L. Sher, I’d heard several women narrate that paragraph as their audition. Some were better than others but I’m not here to talk about them but the opening paragraph. 

     Without meaning to at the time, I had no other motive or agenda but to write a decent paragraph that will make the reader advance to the next paragraph (But, really, every paragraph we write is burdened with that onerous task). But when I heard the words come to life in the gifted voices that were lent to it and bringing Kelley’s words to life, I gradually came to realize that my opening paragraph, which is more economical than Jackson’s already trim and tidy 88 words, did a similar justice to the prologue’s narrator, Kelley McCarthy Delmonico.

     The paragraph reads as follows: 

“(June, 1924) 

I’m not exactly what you call a woman of ten dollar words or airy thoughts. Hell, the one time my late husband Del dragged me to the opera, I would’ve fallen asleep if I hadn’t been thinking of the tunnels below Madison Square Garden I kept hearing about. Cripes, buy me a cheap seat in the nosebleed section for a vaudeville show and I’ll be happier than a bedbug in a Tenderloin flophouse.”  

     Now, in my mind, a good opening paragraph not only introduces the story and the character, but also tends to shed some light on one or even more of the supporting characters whenever possible. Kelley’s 73 words does that, I believe, without a single word going to waste or failing to pull its weight. 

     Firstly, in a book in which all or a significant portion of a full-length novel is told from a character’s point of view, or POV, you need to give the reader an introduction not only into that character’s POV but even a sense of their syntax or speech patterns. 

     Secondly, the opening word immediately tells the reader that her narrative will be told in first person, meaning she’s a woman who knows how to speak her mind and generally does so well enough to be a success at it but more on that later. My old friend, the poet XJ Kennedy, had written in one of his college textbooks that there was a good reason why the poet Randall Jarrell had written his dramatic monologue, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”, in first person, whereas his “Girl in a Library” is written in third person. 

     On the writer's end, a judgment call must immediately be made whether they be poet or novelist as to what that character can bear. In the first poem, Jarrell’s subject and first person narrator is a career woman, perhaps a bureaucrat, in the nation’s Capitol, one who, despite a crippling midlife crisis, is nonetheless highly intelligent, therefore very capable of bearing up under the pressures and expectations of first person narration. 

     Jarrell’s second subject is a college student, one dozing off over a book, and one gets the impression from Jarrell’s narrative that she’s not exactly an honor roll student. Therefore, she’s not a candidate for first person narrative and needs the poet to do the speaking for her. 

   Therefore, just on the off chance that a reader of Hollywoodland, the third book in my Scott Carson series of historical thrillers, has yet to read McCarthy’s debut in The Doll Maker, the second book in the series, I thought it would be a good idea to write an opening paragraph that would give the reader a strong sense of who and what kind of a woman Kelley grew up to be after the events of The Doll Maker, in which she was 13 years-old. 

     So let’s start with the opening line: “I’m not exactly what you call a woman of ten dollar words or airy thoughts.” This shows that Kelley is modest and self-effacing, one who doesn’t feel the need to put on airs. And, without straining for effect or going overboard, I’ve given the reader a sense of the earthiness and pungency with which Kelley expresses herself (And her narrative gets quite earthy and pungent elsewhere in the book). 

     The 33-word second sentence, which takes up almost half the brief paragraph, is much more revealing: “Hell, the one time my late husband Del dragged me to the opera, I would’ve fallen asleep if I hadn’t been thinking of the tunnels below Madison Square Garden I kept hearing about.” 

     This tells us many things about Kelley and her spouse. First of all, her husband Del, a member of the famed restaurant family that founded the Delmonico’s chain of restaurants, had died before the prologue was written. He’d made one abortive attempt to expose her to culture by taking her to the opera, meaning he was a man of some sophistication, classical education and the requisite intelligence to appreciate that which had been offered to him. 

     His wife Kelley, on the other hand, practically fell asleep like Jarrell’s girl in the college library and had managed to keep herself awake by diverting her thoughts to the tunnels beneath the old Madison Square Garden designed by Stanford White that features prominently in three different ways at three different times later on in the book. 

     Now, this, in my mind, is one of the most fascinating aspects of Kelley’s mind and heart- Her obsession with tunnels, mines and anything subterranean. This character trait featured just as prominently and led to the denouement of The Doll Maker. 

     The third and final sentence, in case there’s any doubt as to where Kelley prefers to derive her entertainment, then says, “Cripes, buy me a cheap seat in the nosebleed section for a vaudeville show and I’ll be happier than a bedbug in a Tenderloin flophouse.” That says in pretty unvarnished language that Kelley would much more enjoy herself at a venue that was considered the bottom rung of entertainment than by the finest opera music sung by the world’s finest opera singers.  

     The expressions, “Hell” and “Cripes” also reveal more of Kelley’s earthiness, a woman who plainly doesn’t give a shit about what others think of her or occasionally foul language. The second paragraph, more economical still, states,

     “But part of this tale has to be written by yours truly. I don’t want to spill too many of the beans because one of them women of letters, I think her name was Emma Goldman, once told me telling a story was simple- Start at the beginning, march through the middle, and stop when you get to the destination you need to be at.” 

     In this, she almost apologizes for having to take over the narrative at times, which was how the novel was intentionally structured, and reinforces her habit of self-effacement. Yet, at the same time, she feels it necessary to add that she’s a crime reporter, had written for two large newspapers and was celebrated enough to be able to rub shoulders with early 20^th century thinkers of note such as radical progressive Emma Goldman. 

     But, really, it’s the opening paragraph that sets the tone for the entire book, even though Kelley’s POV is one of but three major ones that comprise the bulk of this book. When writing an opening paragraph, keep it punchy, keep it informative, keep it trim. Then, once you hook the reader in those crucial opening moments, you can later wax poetic if you want. Kelley has a hell of a story to tell, in a way that only she can tell it. And she does a great job of introducing herself as a grown woman.