Many great novels have excellent opening paragraphs that arouse the readers curiosity and make them want to read on.
To grip the readers attention immediateIy, I dived straight into the action with some menacing dialogue from the sworn enemy of my protagonist. I did not introduce any back-story until page 43.
I wrote a prologue for "How To Carve Small Figurines".
This is it.
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If you're going to carve something intricate, it's best to use a fine wire. You have to file away the minuscule layers very slowly.
And don't forget to breathe. Take the time every few seconds to stop what you are doing, and breathe.
I've made that mistake too often. Held my breath too long. Concentrated too deeply on the curve I was forming. On the arch of the brow on a tiny face, just millimetres wide. I cannot bear the smallness of it, the level of detail required to get the expression just right.
So I panic. Stop breathing. Until it's impossible to contain it – the inhalation. I breathe and cause the wire to slip, a scar forming from nose to ear, across the cheek. Irreparable.
If you ever want to carve something, remember this. Remember to breathe.
It takes time to learn this. But we have plenty of time here. And I am learning. Slowly I am learning.
*
We cut the tree last year, in the spring. The wood was still green and it didn't crack as it fell, not like older trees. Instead it bowed and bent, folded in on itself, until there was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, save to fall to the ground.
I watched it as it hit the earth, strangely soundless, and wondered why it didn't complain more. Why there was no groan or creak as it finally fell. It was a young tree, still green inside. Too young perhaps, to have hardened and become bold enough to stand up for itself and scream a complaint.
Trees this young shouldn't be felled.
I said this to Mikka after we dragged it home, but he just smiled and said such trees were good for making spoons. An old tree would be too hard, too angry, he said.
“No-one wants to put something hard and angry in their mouth, Lena.”
That was the kind of thing Mikka liked to say. He liked to confuse me. To make me frown and think about what he had said. He knew it bothered me that there was something he seemed to understand that, to me, seemed alien and peculiar. Something that separated us as brother and sister, if only for a moment. Strangers trying to understand one another.
“How can a tree be angry Mikka? A piece of wood?”
“One day you'll understand what I mean. I'm sure of it.”
The spirit of a thing never changes. A spoon or a tree, it doesn't matter. It's only now that I'm starting to understand this. To feel what it is that is inside all the things around me. Just as Mikka said I one day would.
I wish he was here so I could tell him I am beginning to understand.
Like this tree. Soft, young, green. None of that mattered. It had always known what it was. Even before we chopped it down. Sometimes I think it had been waiting for us to walk into the forest that day. Waiting to reveal itself. Knowing, long before I did, the purpose it served.
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To paraphrase Lao Tzu, "The chapter of a thousand words begins with a single word".
I had almost finished the first draft when the opening paragraph arrived. I think I was asleep at the time, certainly in bed anyway - it's about the softness of the hands of the first president of the Czech Republic - and because it was a curious detail that had puzzled me.
I've only come across a couple of people with really soft hands before - the other was a famous footballer. Anyway... always keep post-it notes and a pencil near your bed!
(The opening paragraphs of my first draft are my shared work btw)