This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick. She is the award-winning author of four books: A Matter of Happenstance, Eternal Day, Going on Nine, and Voyage:A Memoir of Love, War, and Ever After. Her articles, stories and essays have appeared in magazines, newspapers, literary reviews, and anthologies. Fitzpatrick was our featured writer on July 2, 2016.
Leisure
time is a precious commodity today and readers have endless options to fill it
with good read books. If the first words, sentences, or paragraphs don’t
interest or intrigue them, don’t pull them into whatever comes next, they don’t
tend to stick with it.
My
goal, whether I’m working on an essay, a novel, magazine article or memoir, is
to write an opening that makes the reader want more. I try to make my first
sentences either dramatic or humorous, shocking or in some way engaging. What I
choose to say in those few lines must pique the reader’s interest, but also
reveal something about what, and who, comes next. And so, I struggle to find a way to make the
reader chuckle, worry, be wistful or angry, hungry or exhausted, or feel as if
they are right there in the scene I’ve chosen as my opener.
In
the earliest days of my writing career, I was a cub reporter at a metro-daily
newspaper. I sat at a desk in a long row of desks in a cavernous newsroom and
hammered out the news of the day on a manual typewriter. There was neither the
time nor the technology to sample multiple leads, perfecting the verbiage. Later, computers and software were introduced
into newsrooms, opening new and wondrous realms of revision, especially for
feature writers with weekly, rather than daily, deadlines. When working on a
lengthy feature, one that likely would encompass an entire page of the Sunday
editions, I would go back to my lead sentence dozens of times. Often, many
dozens.
Here’s
one of the leads from my newspaper days, the start of a feature story in which
a sense of place was paramount:
About an
hour west of Waco, the mesquite-dotted infinity of central Texas is interrupted
by a pin dot on the map. Gatesville. Population 11,492. On a good day.
Surrounded
by sprawling ranches, Gatesville announces itself with a series of rickety
shacks and corrugated metal feed depots. Nearer in, the Coryell County
Courthouse towers over street corner churches. Pickups crawl the main drag.
Barbecue joints roast meat on charred grills until it sweats itself into
succulence.
The following excerpt is from a humorous
first-person essay I wrote for a literary magazine. The piece is titled,
“Authorwear” and the humor is derived as much from the author’s voice as it is
from her dilemma.
The
black, I think. The sleeveless LBD with a slightly scooped neck and cut-in
armholes. The one that’s ruched front and back ― so clever, rows of shallow
gathers that camouflage a waistline gone to pot. The hem hits a demure inch
above my knee, a flirty but age-appropriate length.
So,
the Little Black Dress with … what? The
black patent backless wedges, of course. Honestly, they’re more like dolled-up
flip flops than author-talk pumps, but they make every cent I spent on a salon
pedicure worth the money. Not to mention, the wedges are blessedly comfortable. Well, that’s settled.
Cripes,
what was I thinking? Black? In the middle of July? In Chicago?
I like writing humorous pieces, and
I had a bit of fun with the opening of a coming-of-age essay published online that
goes on to deal sensitively with girlhood angst. The title is “The Fence.”
First,
I pouted. When that didn’t work, I went off solid food for a few hours. When
that didn’t work, I trudged after my parents to Outer Mongolia. Or so I called
it.
When writing longer works,
book-length works, which have been my focus since “retiring” to gorgeous
Southwest Florida, I have labored over opening lines as never before, trying
out synonyms, braiding words into phrases, constructing sample sentences, culling
and shuffling as I tried to build something memorable, something to grab
readers by their ears and yank them into the story.
My debut novel, A Matter of
Happenstance (2010, Plain View Press), opens with language that is lyric
and picturesque, and then takes an ominous turn…
Levity, that blithe spirit. From
daybreak to moonrise it scripted the story of Blenheim, as if scriveners had
dipped quills in stardust and written on sheets of sky. For ten years the house
seemed to float above harm’s reach, cheating misfortune of its due. Ten years,
an eternity, an eye blink, there and gone. On a July afternoon, under a flaring
sun that rinsed the world of color, stilled the verges of birdsong, and bowed
the fevered heads of a thousand Old Garden roses, gravity slipped in through a
door left ajar.
My next book, Going on Nine (2014,
Familius) was a sweet, nostalgic novel about childhood in the 1950s. After
sampling countless ways to get into the story, I chose to open it with a single,
declarative sentence, wrenching in its simplicity.
I am grieved to the bone.
Although my family story,
Voyage: A Memoir of Love, War, and Ever After (2016 eLectio), is based on
World War II letters written by my father, I chose to open the narrative with a
few poignant phrases that introduced readers to my mother, and to me.
Plastic
bags stuffed with plastic bags. Easy. Pitch. Boxes of high heels, size nine.
Donate. A silk lingerie sack embroidered with a spray of Japanese iris. Well
now. I lift the sack and breathe in the scent of jasmine and ylang-ylang. Joy,
her favorite perfume.
After
Dad died, Mom went downhill. In the end, two of my brothers kept vigil with me
at St. John’s Mercy Hospital. It was early December. I sang Christmas carols at
her bedside, book-ending the lullabies she sang to me decades earlier. Beneath
the sheet, she tapped her foot to “Silent Night.” When I got to the part about
heavenly hosts, she drew her last breath.
The
point is, there is no single way to write a perfect lead, but there are many
ways to write a really good one.
I’ll
leave you with two of my favorites. The first uses drama and pathos to grab the
reader’s attention. The second uses surprise and juxtaposition.
I
was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I
looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. --The Glass
Castle, by Jeannette Walls (2005, Charles Scribner’s Sons)
Having
just died, I shouldn’t be starting my afterlife with a chicken sandwich, no
matter what, especially one served up by nuns. --Learning to Die in Miami
by Carlos Eire (2010, Free Press)
For more information, visit the author's website at www.cufitzpatrick.com or her Amazon Author Page at www.amazon.com/Catherine-Underhill-Fitzpatrick/e/B0045PCSMO
For more information, visit the author's website at www.cufitzpatrick.com or her Amazon Author Page at www.amazon.com/Catherine-Underhill-Fitzpatrick/e/B0045PCSMO
