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Drop the Cat in the Punch Bowl
Great titles cause browsing eyes to pause and investigate. Powerful opening paragraphs entice the reader to keep on reading.
“Growing up in a household of women you get to hear what women say to each other when there aren’t any men around. My theory is that women don’t think of you as a male until your voice changes. Until then, you’re just a gender-neutral ‘kid.’ It’s because of this loophole that I know about Harry Hippenhonda.”
– Roy H. Williams
Do you want to know more about Mr. Hippenhonda?
"All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me."
- Dorothy Parker
Are you curious to know more about Dorothy Parker’s childhood?
Better stories begin with better opening lines; so pay wide-eyed attention to your FMI (First Mental Image). The FMI in your story is the first thing your readers will see clearly in their minds. Most writers bury their most vivid FMI about a third of the way into the opening chapter. They lead up to the main point of their story rather than simply dropping the cat into the punch bowl - SPLASH.
Write your rough draft without thinking, then, find your FMI and rip a big X through everything that occurs prior to it. Splash. Fling open the curtain on those dancing words and you’ll find it much easier to seize the
reader’s attention.
Here are more opening lines that drop the cat:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
“It came down to this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police.”
– Eric Ambler,
The Light of Day
“My first act on entering this world was to kill my mother.”
– William Boyd,
The New Confession
“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”
– Stephen Crane,
Red Badge of Courage
Generally speaking, if you don’t own the reader within the first seven seconds you might as well pack your bags and go home. So open Big.
Action words are big. Especially the ones with tread left on them. Avoid verbs that are worn slick with use. Wallop, sting, smack, snip, jolt and vibrate the reader with verbs. Write with too many adjectives – modifiers – and everyone will think you’re a moon-eyed poet in junior high. So croak the modifiers with action-word bullets. Shoot to kill with unexpected verbs.
It takes a second pair of ears to hear weakness in a story, so don’t be a whining Prima Donna pansy. Brilliant writers want their stories to be edited by a
heartless bastard who won’t spare their feelings. Soft-shell writers want to explain and justify every little thing. That’s why their stories suck like a Hoover. I think Holly Lisle said it
best:“If you assume that the words that flow from your fingertips
were dictated to you by God and are thus sacred and immune from revision,
only you and God are ever going to get to read them.”
Great endings are more important - and even more difficult to write – than great opening lines. Your Last Mental Image (LMI) is the closing scene of the mental movie your words will project onto the screen of your reader’s
imagination. Like a tender kiss, the impression of your LMI should linger long after the reader has moved on to other things. Here’s what I’m talking about:
“He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”
– Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
“But if we’ve succeeded in boring you instead, believe me, we didn’t do it on purpose.”
– Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed
“When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”
– J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“Whether they lived happily ever after is not easily decided.”
– C.S. Forester, The African Queen
“The old man was dreaming about the lions.”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
“For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.”
– J.D. Salinger, Zooey
If you will make your story hard to forget, you will:
1. open with a vivid FMI
2. trigger voluntary mental participation
3. employ unexpected verbs
4. minimize adjectives and modifiers
5. cause the listener to see the action
6. close with a lingering LMI.
Say what you want to say, and say it hot. It’s how bestsellers are written.
Now go… help me write one.
Roy H. Williams
New York Times best-selling author,
Writer of the Wall Street Journal’s
#1 business book in America
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