Hi. Mannequin Monday again. Dressing the blank page. Making art. Welcome back. I love a good opening line. Pulls you right into the story. One of my favorites is the first sentence of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The entire story is set up in the one line. The old man will endure in spite of obstacles and pain.
Opening Lines
This Week’s Reading
This week I read In That Time, a short story by Richard Bausch, featured in Narrative magazine.
Discussion
Richard Bausch opens his short story with the line: “Back in late June of 1949, when I was twelve years old, I spent a morning with Ernest Hemingway.” The line grabs the reader right away. Someone spent a morning with Ernest Hemingway. Tell me more.
Visiting Cuba, sent on an errand to buy a newspaper for his father and stepmother, the boy encounters Ernest Hemingway in a small cafe. What follows is a momentary bonding between boy and author. And when it’s over, the boy has discovered that Hemingway is fluent with fiction, even in his everyday conversations.
In his awkwardness, the boy blurts out to Hemingway, “You killed a lion.” That sparks a conversation about Africa and big game hunting. The boy says he wishes he could travel to Africa and hunt lions. Hemingway talks of killing a water buffalo with a bowie knife. They talk of the war. Hemingway says he has killed many enemy soldiers.
Later in the conversation, the boy begins to realize all of what Hemingway has told him may not be entirely based on fact. “Suddenly I wanted to ask him if the things he had told me were true. I knew that I would not do so, but I also understood that there had been no stabbing of a charging water buffalo with a bowie knife, nor any killing of a hundred Krauts.”
At the end of the morning, after the boy has witnessed Hemingway also talking to several reporters, then to the boy’s father and stepmother, he says of Hemingway: “I had a sudden sense of what the whole morning had cost him, the strain of being who he was in that place and at that time, the world as it was then, keeping up with his fabrications. And I’m convinced that I knew, somehow, sudden as a spark and a dozen years before it happened, how his life would end.”
This Week’s Podcast/Interview
Shawna Baca, a self-taught filmmaker, in an interview with me several years back, talked of making a story breathe life. “I considered myself as a storyteller, not necessarily a writer. Even though I wrote my own material, what I gravitated to more than the material was the intention or purpose of the story and how we were all emotionally influenced by that story.” She went on to say, “… writing a good story is key but then knowing how to make that story breathe life is the magical part that makes each filmmaker unique in his or her own right.”
Knowing how to make a story breathe life. That’s what it’s all about.
My Current Writing
The opening line of my book blurb: “One phone call jolts young Tessa Warren out of her black-and-white, home-alone life.”
Listening to Dan Blank’s podcast conversation with author Leigh Stein, I sparked on something Stein mentioned. In marketing her current fiction title, due out in June, she thought she’d like to try creating a zine she could share with potential readers. It gave me the idea to create a zine of my own, a digital version, to help publicize my YA novel Off-Road. Since I don’t have Photoshop, I used Pages to build a basic two-page ezine. The result is below. My MacBook Pro is ten years old, and I can’t upgrade past El Capitan, so my methodology is limited (frustrating?). I managed to get the ezine from Pages to Photo as a JPEG, then into Facebook and Twitter. I like it, and I’ll experiment with more later on. Maybe even create a larger ezine to use as a bonus for signing up for my newsletter.
Enjoy your week. Don’t forget to make art. And make your story breathe life!
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