Beginnings

“My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying” - Anton Chekhov.

"Love your work, Anton."

I am currently in my second week of a creative writing masters and, fittingly, we're studying beginnings. I thought that I'd pretty much come to a locked-in decision about my beginning – simple, to the point, setting up Dasha's earliest life and memories – but now I think I might have been wrong. A very clever man who I won't name, because I'm sure he has enough on his plate without being inundated with pleas for advice, suggested that I start the story in the middle of Dasha's first dramatic happening; in this case, her frostbitten fingers and Lilia's unsympathetic ministering. Okay, I thought, this is good stuff. But then again, where does this practice stop? If we were to start everything at the most dramatic point, what would happen to all the lovely in between bits that build subtleties in the characters? Where are those sometimes boring backgrounds that you need to turn a character from an idea into a possible entity?

Beginning just sounds too ominous. There's too much pressure to begin something well. Perhaps instead we should call them points of departure. I'd like to take the opportunity to quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the matter of his departures. After all, anything I can say he could say better:

“I start with a visual image. For other writers, I think, a book is born out of an idea, a concept. I always start with an image. Tuesday Siesta, which I consider my best short story, grew out of seeing a woman and a young girl dressed in black with a black umbrella walking through a deserted town in the scorching sun. In Leaf Storm, it’s an old man taking his grandson to a funeral. The point of departure for Nobody Writes to the Colonel was the image of a man waiting for a launch in the market-place in Barranquilla. He was waiting with a kind of silent anxiety. Years later in Paris I found myself waiting for a letter, a money order probably – with the same anxiety and I identified with the memory of that man” - from The Fragrance of Guava : Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez pp26-27.

Lara S.