Random
Where to Begin?
One writer I know said a story begins on the day something different happened. Another said the story begins where the trouble particular to the point of view starts. Another said give away everything at the beginning, the way John Irving does. Another said start with the strongest possible bit of language or the strongest sentence. Another said start in the middle. Another said start with something mysterious and compelling. Another said start with some nonsense to make the promise you’ll keep. Another said start ambiguously. Another said start unambiguously. Another said start at the end. Another said start at the beginning. My uncle committed suicide, and I wanted to write an essay about it, but I couldn’t figure out where to start, so instead of writing about my uncle’s death, I wrote about “The Question of Where We Begin.” There was no satisfactory answer to the question of where we begin. Every time the question gets asked, it raises a hundred new questions. Where did the trouble begin? If you believe, as some stories do, in a cause-and-effect chain, can’t it be traced back to the beginning of everything? What then? Isn’t this the argument they’re having in school board meetings in Kansas and Texas? And isn’t it true that by dint of deciding where you begin, you’re already giving the lie at the center of “nonfiction”? Because nothing is untouched by subjectivity, and no story doesn’t betray something about its maker?
I’m intrigued, then, by the strategies employed by an old mass market writer 
named James Michener, who didn’t write books about Bob or Jane or Dick or Tiger or Terry or T.J. or Tylene. He wrote novels about Texas or Poland or South Africa or Space. And with subjects so large — subjects usually tackled by historians or political philosophers geologists or geographers or journalists, rather than by novelists — wouldn’t he have to come up with a strategy that made a rather different kind of promise than “Friday morning, Evelyn woke up to find her husband dead”?
Here is the opening to Michener’s novel Hawaii:
Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others. It was a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as pacific.
Over its brooding surface immense winds swept back and forth, whipping the waters into towering waves that crashed down upon the world’s seacoasts, tearing away rocks and eroding the land. In its dark bosom, strange life was beginning to form, minute at first, then gradually of a structure now lost even to memory. Upon its farthest reaches birds with enormous wings came to rest, and then flew on.
Agitated by a moon stronger then than now, immense tides ripped across this tremendous ocean, keeping it in a state of torment. Since no great amounts of sand had yet been built, the waters where they reached shore were universally dark, black as night and fearful.
Scores of millions of years before man had risen from the shores of the ocean to perceive its grandeur and to venture forth upon its turbulent waves, this eternal sea existed, larger than any other of the earth’s features, vaster than the sister oceans combined, wild, terrifying in its immensity and imperative in its universal role.
How utterly vast it was! How its surges modified the very balance of the earth! How completely lonely it was, hidden in the darkness of night or burning in the dazzling power of a younger sun than ours.
At recurring intervals the ocean grew cold. Ice piled up along its extremities, and so pulled vast amounts of water from the sea, so that the wandering shoreline of the continents sometimes jutted miles farther out than before. Then, for a hundred thousand years, the ceaseless ocean would tear at the exposed shelf of the continents, grinding rocks into sand and incubating new life.
Later, the fantastic accumulations of ice would melt, setting cold waters free to join the heaving ocean, and the coasts of the continents would lie submerged. Now the restless energy of the sea deposited upon the ocean bed layers of silt and skeletons and salt. For a million years the ocean would build soil, and then the ice would return; the waters would draw away; and the land would lie exposed . . .
I’ve elided the next two-and-a-half paragraphs in the interest of getting to the next part of the opening you should notice. What you might already have noticed is that we haven’t even got to the origin story of the Hawaiian islands yet. The time we’ve been parsing is geological. Michener was patient in these matters. Almost all of his books are doorstop-suitable. By comparison, Jonathan Franzen has published four novellas. But, finally, we get to our titular subject:
Then one day, at the bottom of the deep ocean, along a line running two thousand miles from northwest to southeast, a rupture appeared in the basalt rock that formed the ocean’s bed. Some great fracture of the earth’s basic structure had occurred, and from it began to ooze a white-hot, liquid rock . . .
The next fifteen paragraphs cover a few million years, from first underwater lava eruption to the pre-human rise of island life. A friend at the University of Texas told me that when James Michener made his large bequest to the university to build a world-class writing program, some people at the university turned up their noses at the money because he wasn’t a literary enough writer. But I’ve been reading around in his books lately, and they are full of useful, interesting, intelligent, and appropriable tropes that would enrich books of all varieties, point of entry being only the first worth studying and discussing.
The world of genre fiction is full of hidden treasures of this sort, from the intelligent (and appropriable) strategies for reckoning with ideas and managing volumes of information (how do they breathe on the methane planet Zooli-19, anyway?) in science-fiction, to the intelligent (and appropriable) first- and third- person observer-narrator procedural tropes of cop and law (which, whether they know it or not, are deeply rooted in point of view questions, since the central story is unknown to the teller of the tale at the beginning of the dramatic present, which makes them kin to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”), to the strategies for complicating or undoing mythic American themes that we see in the better Westerns (Oakley Hall’s Warlock or John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, to name two.)
As literature gets smart enough to operate in a spirit of aesthetic openness and generosity, and borrows more broadly from art, philosophy, video games, microbudgeted films from Sweden and Singapore, minimalist installations, conceptual thises and thats, may its practitioners also be smart enough to look in the seldom opened cabinets out in the garage, where the ugly stepchildren stashed the treasures hoping someone would find them. It’s good to find them.
I heard that Michener (whether or not due to Cold War reasons, I don’t know) never set foot in Poland before writing that novel; he had “people on the ground” and it’s said he might have had glimpses from a helicopter in the air.
Trying to figure out where to begin a story goes to the concept of time and how the writer deals with temporal issues. There are many ways to begin – this is one of the many pleasures of literature.
My dad is a huge Michener fan for this very reason (he’s also really into fantasy and other Big-World-building type universes, which somehow seems similar in this discussion). He keeps trying to sell the books to me on the basis that they start at the Very Beginning, but I keep bristling at that idea, which I then question (is this a workshop reaction that I don’t want to start at the Very Beginning?).
What are people’s favorite beginnings? Off the top of my head, In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird are for sure favorites of mine. I’m sure there are others, but those jump immediately.
I loved Michener growing up, especially ‘Centennial’ and ‘Mexico’.
figuring out the beginning of a story is or should be a humbling experience. No matter what beginning we come up with, it is necessarily both a beginning and an admission that we are finite and faulty, that there are infinitely more beginnings, and that a great amount of those is probably better than the one we’ve decided on during a particular time and place and mood. I like that. That being said, I still think it’s a worthy thing to struggle over. It just so happens to be a thing that, no matter how much we struggle over, we’re very rarely going to have the consolation that *this* is the beginning we were after. And that’s ok.
Kyle, all I know is that i read that essay of yours (before i knew who you were from this site), and i’m not trying to blow you or anything, but you killed it, perfect, and i can’t imagine a way you could have told that story any better. so whatever you’re doing for beginnings, keep doing it.
I love that you call Michener “an old mass market writer named James Michener.” This man won a pulitzer! For writing the book that South Pacific’s based on! It’s a crazy world.
Yup. Just ‘mazed at the idea of Michener, the ur-Pop Novelist, being described as, you know, that guy who wrote some old mass markets or whatever. I feel no abiding love for Michener, but his book were EVENTS, as opposed to e-vents. Massive hardbacks like crude weaponry. I think of old mass markets as, say, Don Pendleton’s Executioner series (sample title, The Executioner # 143: Helldust Cruise!). I enjoyed the post, keep up the good work!
I know you are thinking of beginnings, but it’s inevitable Michener hijacks the thread.
I was so excited by the idea of Michener, that I couldn’t wait to read Drifters, which someone had told me was similar to a book I had written. I bought the mass market paperback, took it with me on a trip assuming I would be entertained on the beach by a book of this phone-book like girth, and within a few pages it was clear I had miscalculated and would soon be scouring Spanish book stores for used English paperbacks. It was unreadable. And I like plenty of popular writers, early Crichton, Gary Jennings, Puzo, etc, but this committed the sin I can’t abide in my blockbusters: it was SLOW.
I think the same sort of bias exists against Larry McMurtry. But, All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers exists on the same plain as Richard Ford or a slightly tipsy Updike.
[…] Kyle Minor over at HTML Giant has a great piece about beginnings, James Michener, and the red-headed step children of literature. […]
All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers is terrific. McMurtry’s books up to just before Lonesome Dove were closely observed, comic novels with some psychological. After LD (which is a beautiful, very different book), he gradually became mannered and lazy.
I’ve never read Michener, but wow I just loved that excerpt. What’s the best one to start with?
(Evidentially not Drifters.)
An exact but unhelpful rule: you begin where the prose works for you. Later, you may decide that starting somewhere else might be better. But the original gambit gets you there.
Also — and this is what made him the Cold War hit that he was — Michener didn’t so much write novels as write up research about interesting locations. A team of interns did all the grunt work. Consider the first paragraph that you’ve quoted. Can you imagine any Net reader today being impressed by it? In those days (I was there), this kind of knowledge about “millions and millions of years ago” was special — the property of either the Encyclopedia Britannica or Disneyland.
I recall stately, plump entries into younger and more vulnerable screamings coming across the sky, and I think, for the reader, the “beginning” is always in medias res. No matter how carefully built the preface, prologue, preamble, introduction, and maieusis of a ‘world’, into it one is plunged.
For the writer, this trivial yuppieism is – sadly for us Ponderous Objects – an Irresistible Force: just begin.
Agreed. Although I did like Duane’s Depressed quite a bit (and a few of the early memoirs).
His beginning seems a little similar to East of Eden, how Steinbeck describes the valley and then the farm. It seem culturally speaking that books now are more minimalist because of our lack of time, and easy access to specific knowledge on the internet. Many novels were meant to teach nonfiction ideas to the readers, or like Don Quoxite suppose to be read to family and friends because they didn’t have TV or radio.
[…] One writer I know said a story begins on the day something different happened. Another said the story begins where the trouble particular to the point of view starts. Another said give away everything at the beginning, the way John Irving does. Another said start with the strongest possible bit of language or the strongest sentence. Another said start in the middle. Another said start with something mysterious and compelling. Another said start with some nonsense to make the promise you’ll keep. Another said start ambiguously. Another said start unambiguously. Another said start at the end. Another said start at the beginning. Every time the question gets asked, it raises a hundred new questions. Where did the trouble begin? If you believe, as some stories do, in a cause-and-effect chain, can’t it be traced back to the beginning of everything? What then? Isn’t this the argument they’re having in school board meetings in Kansas and Texas? And isn’t it true that by dint of deciding where you begin, you’re already giving the lie at the center of “nonfiction”? Because nothing is untouched by subjectivity, and no story doesn’t betray something about its maker? […]
The novelist David Bradley used to teach the start of a short story can be found in the old Passover question: “Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?”
The novelist David Bradley used to teach the start of a short story can be found in the old Passover question: “Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?”
The novelist David Bradley used to teach the start of a short story can be found in the old Passover question: “Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?”
I like that, Dinty. Did Bradley ever write on this subject? I’d like to read it.