Storytellersunplugged

By Jeff Mariotte

No, not Breaking and Entering. Beginnings and Endings. Since it’s the season of giving, I thought I’d give Storytellers Unplugged’s dear readers a gift and let them read something other than my standard yawp about how and why I do whatever it is that I do.

I write from four to six novels a year, most years (he wrote, immediately breaking the promise above). So it sometimes feels like I’m always either writing a beginning or an ending.

Both are important, if not absolutely critical, to the success or failure of a book. The opening draws the reader in, or had better do so. The ending, the last words the reader reads, leaves the final taste in that person’s metaphorical mouth, the lingering trace on the retina, and color what the reader thinks when she closes the book. Whether she is going to re-read it, recommend it to friends, or throw it into the fireplace depends much more on those last words than on the first.

So (he wrote, returning to the first paragraph’s pledge after all), I thought that I would scan the bookshelves here at the Ranch and offer up some mostly random but well-crafted beginnings and endings, by a variety of writers. Some of these are well known, classics of the type. Others are not. Maybe they’ll inspire you to new heights in your own efforts. It never hurts us to be exposed to writers who do it well.

I’ll reveal at the bottom who wrote what—see how many you can guess. And have a happy Solstice and a wonderful holiday season, each and every one of you.

1. “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him; he hasn’t seen you yet.’”

And

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”

2. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

And

“On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.”

3. “Trust me for a while.
“I understand that’s really the line the spider hit the fly with, not ‘come into my parlor’ as popular legend has it, and I also realize I am not always your most Walter Cronkite type fella, sturdy, staunch, etc. But in this particular instance, there is just no doubt in my you-should-pardon-the-expression mind that I know whereof I speak.
“Corky thinks I’m crazy, natch.
“Somebody sure is.”

And

“Peggy lay on the bed for a long time and studied the lovely wooden heart. God he had wonderful hands. She stayed on the bed, turning the heart over and over. Then she got up and examined herself in the mirror. She looked fifty easy, what with the puffy eyes and the wrinkled clothes, but a change of wardrobe could fix the one, Max Factor could go a long way toward helping with the other. When she was pretty again, she put on a nice dress because even though she didn’t love him, Corky’s kind of talent you had to string along with, and with that thought firmly in mind, she went down to the cabin to tell him so…”

4. “It was a solecism of the very worst kind. He sneezed loudly, wetly, and quite unforgivably into the woman’s face. He’d been holding it back for three-quarters of an hour, fighting it off as if it were Henry Tudor’s vanguard in the Battle of Bosworth. But at last he’d surrendered. And after the act, to make matters worse, he immediately began to snuffle.”

And

“Gillian stirred in the back seat. ‘Whose house—‘ Her voice died as the door flew open and Tessa ran outside, hesitating on the front path, peering towards the car. ‘Mummy.’ Gillian said it on a breath. She said nothing else. She got out of the car slowly and stared at the woman as if she were an apparition, clinging to the door for support. ‘Mummy?’
“‘Gilly! Oh my God, Gilly!’ Tessa cried and began coming towards her.
“It was all Gillian needed. She ran up the slope into her mother’s arms, and they entered the house together.”

5. “The urban renewers had struck again. They’d evicted me, a fortune-teller, and a bookie from the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston, moved in with sandblasters and bleached oak and plant hangers, and the last I looked appeared to be turning the place into a Marin County whorehouse. I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank. I felt at home. In the bank they did the same kind of stuff the fortune-teller and the bookie had done. But they dressed better.”

And

“‘Let’s go in and eat,’ I said.
“‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was a little shaky. When I opened the door to the cabin I could see in the light from the kitchen that there were tears on his face. He made no attempt to hide them. I put my arm around his shoulder.
“‘Winter’s coming,’ I said.”

6. “to wound the autumnal city.
“So howled out for the world to give him a name.
“The in-dark answered with wind.”

And

“It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can’t remember any more if. I want to know but I can’t see are you up there. I don’t have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to”

7. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”

And

“‘And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,’ he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining—just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”

8. “ I flew home from Mazatlån on a Wednesday afternoon. As we approached Los Angeles, the Mexicana plane dropped low over the sea and I caught my first glimpse of the oil spill.
“It lay on the blue water of the Pacific in a free-form slick that seemed miles wide and many miles long. An off-shore oil platform stood up out of its windward end like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood.”

And

“She paid no attention to me. She stepped off into air and fell in silence until the black boulders stopped her. Smoke swirled over her body like the smoke from funeral pyres.
“I went back to Laurel. She stirred and half awakened, as if my concern for her had reached down palpably into her sleeping mind. She was alive.
“I picked up the phone and started to make the necessary calls.”

9. “The Axe Boy lived downstairs. We were friendly because he was forever walking an ugly little dog I patted when I bumped into them in the hall.”

And

“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about? Thinking about a lot? Whether Eliot is with Pepsi now. Even if he first had to go to Ophir Zik, I know Pepsi would get Eliot out of there in a flash. That would be great. They would have so much fun together.
“There’s no way to express how much I miss them.
“It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, and it’s not always where your heart is. Sometimes I win and sometimes not.”

10. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.

And

“‘An’ they chased him ‘n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice….’
“His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me.
“‘Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.’
“He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

1. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
2. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
3. William Goldman, Magic
4. Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance
5. Robert B. Parker, Early Autumn
6. Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
7. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
8. Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty
9. Jonathan Carroll, Bones of the Moon
10. Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird