Week 13 - 

Online Lecture for Beginnings and Endings

Everybody's talking  

1.  Assigned Reading:  

2.  Class Workshop Critique

Beginnings and Endings

   "I know writers who spend more time on the first and last paragraph then they do writing the whole story!" this from a writer friend of mine who has published several novels.  And she isn't alone!   

When we see a wonderful first line or last paragraph, we we feel a surge of admiration, even gratitude, to the writer.  We know we have been given something that is lovely in itself, that may have taken a good deal of effort [regardless of how effortless it might seem], and we feel like we are about to be, or have been in masterful hands, treated to a work that transcends the everyday.

But first/last  lines that are truly excellent do more than present a stylish flourist - they often characterize the scope, setting, direction, and even "greater truth" of a piece of writing.  For example Joyce Carol Oates, in Wonderland, begins the story with the line:  "I was a child murderer."

It's a great line, because, first, we don't know from this whether the narrator murdered children, or himself was a murderer as a child.  And we keep reading to find out.  As the story develops, we don't find out any too soon!  The narrator is a shape-changer - moving easily from one persona to another - encouraging us to explore his pysche and find out who is the real "child maruderer."

Another provocative first line occurs in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude:  "As he stood before the firing squad, Colonel Jose Buendia remembered the time his father took him to see ice."  and a little later "they crossed a river with stones as big as dinosaur eggs."

Now Solitude is a long and complicated novel.  Buendia is standing before the firing squad in what is historically the 1920's or 1930's or maybe the 1960's in some fictional South America.  But the "ice" part harkens back to the coming of Eurpean culture to the continent.  So the very fist line lets us in on something that we won't understand until the end of the book - that Buendia will be "reincarnated" in several roles over the centuries; it also gives us something to be curious about.  Why go off on a journey to see ice?  Because, until the Eurpoean culture came to the jungle, no one had ever seen ice ( - it was a miracle substance in ages past!

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California