Ann Hood "Beginnings" Response

As Hood describes how opening sentences introduce the protagonist, I wonder whether she is disguising herself beneath her premise. While reading the story’s first paragraph about how painstakingly Hood composes her first paragraphs, it strikes me that even as candid as an author appears, the message given is carefully composed, and may be crafted to merely simulate honesty. Hood echoes the self doubt she is describing in phrases like “the opening paragraph–no, the opening page–has to do so much….” .

I was struck by the concept originated by Richard Hugo that Hood brings up, that of a story’s “two beginnings,” the true beginning discovered while writing and the beginning “triggered” by the writer’s initial interest. The criticism that a story with these two beginnings often receives, that the story only begins several pages past the “triggering” beginning, is one I have often received in workshops of my short stories!

As soon as I began reading this story, my mind was drawn again and again to one of my favorite novels, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. I was delighted, when I reached the end of “Beginnings,” to see that Hood shares my admiration. From this first admittedly long line, readers gain much information about the story that will follow. They are simultaneously alerted to the nontraditional nature of the narrator, the elegiac nature of the style, and the vantage point of the story, that of an adult looking back on a turbulent and conflicted teenage time. 

The use of the “old saw” opening line of “Once upon a time…” is certainly trite, but I think it can be effective when combined with a sentence that juxtaposes the innocent, fairy-tale like quality of the beginning phase. I find myself drawn to in media res opening lines, as they immediately engage and provide an active challenge to the reader. 

Now, this assignment completed, I’m off to obsessively scrutinize the first line of everything I’ve ever written!