BEGINNINGS? Get PATtention!

So often, when studying short fiction, we've been taught that "ski slope" diagram by English teachers--you know, the one that begins with "character" and "setting" at the beginning, peaks with "climax," and ends with "resolution." Trouble is, we haven't always been taught how to WRITE an effective opening, middle, or ending. Today, let's focus on BEGINNINGS...

In my mind, an effective opening accomplishes two tasks:

1. It gets ATTENTION.
2. It creates PATHOS.

Getting attention is critical. If you don't attract the eye of the reader, the page is flipped quickly to someone who DOES accomplish that.

Pathos is the feeling the reader has for a character. It's important that the writer makes the reader care about the character BEFORE the conflict. Otherwise, if readers don't sympathize with the character, they won't care what happens to that character. Let's look at a few examples:

Opening paragraph from "YOU OWE ME," by Miah Arnold:

The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronouncable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again.

Opening paragraph from "HOUSEWIFELY ARTS," by Megan Mayhew Bergman:

I am my own housewife, my own breadwinner. I make lunches and change light bulbs. I kiss bruises and kill copperheads from the backyard creek with a steel hoe. I change sheets and the oil in my car. I can make a pie crust and exterminate humpback crickets in the crawlspace with a homemade glue board, though not at the same time. I like to compliment myself on these things, because there's no one else around to do it.

The two stories above get our attention and make us care about the main character. The first, a nonfiction personal essay, begins with children who have terminal cases of cancer AND the writer whose job it is to work with them, seeing child after child die. We end up caring about the children AND the writer. The second, a short story, has a very strong character we admire--one who seems to be able to do almost anything on her own--but we care because of a few of the words that opening ends with: "there's no one else around." We WANT this person to find someone to love (cue the Queen music now:"Find me somebody to love...").

Want to create an effective opening? Get ATTENTION and create PATHOS. Put them together and what do you get? Get PATTENTION!