Okay so homework took all night so then I went to bed. So now I have… Thoughts.
I absolutely loved the paragraph, every moment of it. It’s so whimsical… But also grim. A fantastic juxtaposition of tones. I haven’t read the story, but I’m going to now. And it’s written beautifully.
So why do so many of the comments hate it? Well, I have a theory on that. While some of the comments touched on how times and conventions have changed since the story was written, I think there’s more to it than that. In this essay, I will explore the complexity of an opening paragraph and…
Okay. So this isn’t a formal essay, and I might throw out a few grammar conventions, but I do have a lot to say, so buckle up because you’re in for a ride. Just be forewarned this is all filtered through the ever subjective lens of my personal opinion.
First off I want to address “what makes a good opening paragraph,” and I want to say that… It’s not about following writing conventions, or hooking your reader in—most people will read at least your first chapter before they leave, anyways—or anything else that people will usually tell you.
No, what makes a good opening paragraph is how it sets up the pacing and tone for the rest of the story—be it a novel, series, or flashfic. For an example of something that did this extremely well, I present to you the opening paragraph of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings (mild spoilers ahead):
Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast. The enormous stone beast lay on its side, riblike protrusions from its chest broken and cracked. The monstrosity was vaguely skeletal in shape, with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulders. The eyes were deep red spots on the arrowhead face, as if created by a fire burning deep within the stone. They faded.
The pace—the rate at which information is delivered and in what order—of the paragraph matches the pace of the entire (technically I haven’t finished reading it, but I’m in the middle of Rhythm of War—the most recent installment—and it seems to hold out, and nobody I’ve spoken to who has finished it has reported a whacky pace change) rest of the series, and the tone—the way it makes you feel—lines up spectacularly as well. The paragraph promises a relatively slow story, but one that’s not going to stall out. While in the weaker parts it does, almost, stall, it picks up momentum again shortly thereafter. It promises there’s going to be an overarching sense of dread, too, and there is.
This is a story that sets about to make you ask yourself questions.
So that’s one example from a book I liked. How about one from a book I didn’t like?
Now I’m going to talk about The Hobbit. A lot of people can quote the opening sentence of this book—or even the whole paragraph. It’s iconic.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy-smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
The next paragraph goes on to describe what a hobbit-hole is like, the third paragraph mentions the hobbit by name—Baggins—and talks about the Baggins family. Near the end of the fourth paragraph, after we’ve talked about the mother of the Baggins in question, and what, exactly, a hobbit is, we finally get more on the Baggins—Bilbo Baggins—the story will be about.
There’s a whimsical detachment in these paragraphs that has a unique way of hooking you in. Like it’s whispering “Come here, I’ve got a story for you. Oh, take a seat will you? This is a long one. This is a story to meander through with a friend. It might stall out, it might get distracted, but this is a humble telling of an extraordinary tale of long ago, and it will always come back to the little hobbit who did something completely, totally, entirely unexpected.”
You know what? That’s exactly what it is, too. When I read The Hobbit for the first time, I didn’t like that. I wanted a fast paced story about dragons and war and fire. Now, I’ve grown up a bit, and I might reread it soon here and we’ll see how that goes. I have a feeling I’ll enjoy it a bit more now that I understand how to appreciate a slow paced story (because yeah, that’s a skill we have to learn these days with all the media books are competing with).
For an example of a bad opening, I’ll present Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees- willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.
I apologize for the links, I don’t have a copy of this book, so I had to copy and paste it from the internet.
Anyways, this paragraph almost reads like it should be in first person, or some similarly close point of view, but when we finally meet the characters—two of them, having a conversation, if I recall correctly—they’re distant from us, as if we’re watching them from afar. Of Mice and Men is short, only 30,000 words. At least 15,000 of them are held up in descriptions like the one above—ones that boarder on the delicate line between flowery prose and purple prose, and often times step over it. This book promises a similar style story to The Hobbit, but with a subtle undertone of “please forgive me, I’ve never done this before”—which, if my memory serves, was not true of Steinbeck. Instead of having a steady, but slow pace, this story jolts forward every time Steinbeck pauses in his poetic descriptions. If you could sort through the descriptions for the actually story, what you’d have was a break-neck paced short story.
For that reason, this is a bad opening paragraph.
So now let’s double back to Who Goes There?
Here’s the paragraph from that one:
The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the iceburied cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fishoil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweatandsnowdrenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, notunpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air. Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates dogs, machines and cooking came another taint. It was a queer, neckruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a lifesmell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.
This promises a similar story to The Hobbit, as well, but it’s written much, much better than Of Mice and Men. As of yet, I haven’t read the whole story, but when—in the very next paragraph—a character is introduced, it seems to be the kind of story I would expect.
The kind to meander through by firelight, with forgotten histories in mind.
Basically, I think the people in the comments on Wattpad were made by people who haven’t really developed the capacity to appreciate slower paces yet, and who are also looking at it through the lens of, well, Wattpad. I don’t think any of the above works could ever do well on Wattpad, or any platform like it, because they’re not the kind of stories the people those platforms attract want to read.
I do my best to differentiate the worlds, though.