Rugged mountain peaks cloaked in snow. A
parched desert streaked in reds and yellows. The billowing swells of a tallgrass prairie. The landscape of the West is
“scene one” in nearly every western movie you’ve ever watched, or described on the
first few pages of every western novel you’ve ever read. It acts as an unnamed but vital
character and provides a beautiful–or punishing–backdrop to the story being
told.
Director John Ford frequently
featured the stark Monument Valley scenery, beginning
with Stagecoach (1939) to Cheyenne Autumn (1965).
Writers look to landforms to evoke deep emotions, as did
William A. Quayle:
“Loneliness, thy other name, thy one true synonym, is prairie.” The Prairie
and the Sea (1905)
To explorer and conservationist John Muir, it was
more of a religious experience:
“Long,
blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow,
at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every
mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was
the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations
of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a
rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting
to be blessed.” The Wild Muir: Twenty-two
of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures (2013)
Elmer Kelton recognized the
magical connection between people and the ground the land they lived and died
on. He wrote in The Day the Cowboys Quit, “Some people would never
understand the hold this land could take on a man if he stayed rooted long
enough in one spot to develop a communion with the grass-blanketed earth, to begin
to feel and fall in with the rhythms of the changing seasons. There was a pulse
in this land, like the pulse in a man, though most people never paused long
enough to sense it.”
Annie
Proulx also suggests that the power of landscape goes beyond the physical. Here is
her definition from the essay, “Dangerous Ground.”
“Landscape
is geography, archaeology, astrophysics, agronomy, agriculture, the violent
character of the atmosphere, climate, black squirrels and wild oats, folded
rock, bulldozers; it is jet trails and barbwire, government land, dry stream
beds; it is politics, desert wildfire, introduced species, abandoned vehicles,
roads, ghost towns, nuclear test grounds, swamps, a bakery shop, mine tailings,
bridges, dead dogs. Landscape is rural, urban, suburban, semirural, small
town, village; it is outposts and bedroom communities; it is a remote ranch.”
No other writing genre is as tied to the land as is western literature. What an incredible and inspiring resource!
“The land belongs to the future … that’s the way it seems to me. How
many names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I
might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s
children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people
who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little
while.” - Willa Cather
Being a peace officer is, well, not always peaceful. It is a
dangerous profession. Being in the federal marshals service has its own set of
attendant dangers, as one of our regular contributors knows from experience.
That particular profession was especially dangerous, though, in the late 19th
century.
You can go to the Officers Down Memorial Page and read
through a list, with some details attached, of every member of the U.S.
Marshals Service to die in the line of duty since it was established in 1789.
The list includes both Deputy U.S. Marshals and deputized posse members. The
first to fall was Marshal Robert Forsyth, killed in Georgia in 1794 –he was
shot through a door while attempting to serve papers. The most recent name on
the list (as of this writing) is that of Deputy Commander Patrick Thomas
Carothers, a 26-year veteran –he, too, was shot in Georgia while attempting to
enter a home to serve a warrant. In all, the list contains 280 names (again, so
far).
190 of those men died between 1870 and 1910. That is more
than two-thirds.
It will come as no surprise to many of our readers and
contributors that one-half of those 1870-1910 deaths, 95 to be specific,
occurred in the area known initially as Indian Territory, later divided into
Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory, and by the end of that era the state
of Oklahoma. To do a little more math, that means that ONE-THIRD of all members
of the Marshals Service to die in the line of duty did so in Oklahoma in the
space of a few decades.
That’s because Oklahoma was, as they say, wide open. Or as a
saying from the time put it, “There is no Sunday west of St. Louis, and no God
west of Fort Smith.”
This was due to a very unique set of circumstances surrounding
Oklahoma. The eastern half was the home (not by choice, for many of them) of
the “Five Civilized Tribes”: Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and
Seminoles, who had been removed to Oklahoma in the 1830s (and 1840s, for the
resisting Seminoles), although a minority had acquiesced and come peacefully of
their own accord before the Trail of Tears. The western half of Oklahoma was,
at that time, home to the so-called “wild” tribes- Comanches, Kiowas, and etc.
The Five Tribes had written laws and their own police
forces, called light horse, to enforce them (depending on the tribe, individual
districts also had sheriffs). This was all well and good when dealing with
Indian criminals and Indian victims, but a jurisdictional morass arose when
non-Indians were involved. You see, the Indians had no jurisdiction over crimes
that involved American citizens (non-Indians, in other words). At the same
time, the Supreme Court had long since determined that, constitutionally, state
and local governments had no jurisdiction over Indian country. In such cases
(and this is still true), only the federal government has authority. At that
time, this meant the U.S. Marshals Service, which eventually operated out of
the court in Fort Smith, Arkansas (which was right on the border of Indian
Territory). For many years, that court was presided over by Judge Isaac Parker,
known widely as “The Hanging Judge.”
What this meant, in the 1870s and 1880s, was this: if you were
an outlaw operating in Texas, Arkansas, or Missouri, you could “light out for
the Nations” and have a very good chance of getting away and being able to
continue your wayward career. The local Indian authorities could not touch you,
and state or county lawmen could not follow you. The only people who could come
after you were members of the U.S. Marshals Service. (Sometimes this situation
was altered by Indian peace officers, such as the Cherokee Sam Sixkiller, also
being deputized as Deputy U.S. Marshals. There were also quite a few black marshals, Bass Reeves being the most famous.)
Therefore, there were a lot of outlaws in the Nations, with
a finite number of federal marshals to track them down. It’s no surprise, then,
that so many marshals were killed in the attempt to do so. Look through that
280 name list, and you might be surprised how many lawmen were killed in
Oklahoma after catching their man –by sleeping on the return trip to Fort
Smith, and being killed with axes or big sticks or whatever the prisoners who
managed to work their way loose were able to get their hands on.
The situation got worse in the 1890s, after the Dawes Act
had allowed for the allotment of most tribes’ land and the opening of parts of
Oklahoma for settlement. The Five Tribes were excluded from this at first,
since they were technically already “civilized”, although an addition to the
law in 1898 brought them under allotment as well. Starting at the end of the
1880s and growing exponentially by the year, the Five Tribes were surrounded by
more and more settlers, making the jurisdictional issue ever more pronounced as
more non-Indians in the region magnified the problem. These were the days of
the Doolins and the Daltons, of Cherokee Bill, of the Starrs, of the famed “Three
Guardsmen” (Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, and Bill Tilghman) leading federal
posses after outlaws, and of the efforts to capture Ned Christie (and other,
lesser-known Cherokees such as Bill Pigeon).
So that explains the high mortality rate of officers in
Oklahoma. But what about the rest of the country during that same period? Going
back to that concept of mathematics, fully one-third of federal marshals ever
killed in the line of duty fell from 1870-1910… outside of Oklahoma. So it was
still a pretty violent time everywhere else, as well.
Not all of them were murdered. Thomas Foley was killed in
Virginia in 1870 when a courtroom balcony collapsed and killed him and 61 other
people. Clement McCausland died in Dakota Territory in 1872 while pursuing a
fugitive, when he got lost in a blizzard. James Arnold died in 1891 while
transporting a prisoner to a prison on an island off the coast of Washington
(the state) –a sudden squall capsized their sailboat and he drowned.
Almost all, however, were murdered. As one would expect, a
large number of those deaths occurred in the American West (not counting
Oklahoma). We should probably count the two marshals killed in Alaska in
separate incidents during the Klondike gold rush among those. Some names on the
list who died in the West might jump out at the western reader: Bob Olinger,
for example, killed in Lincoln County, NM, by Billy the Kid during a jailbreak.
Here’s the interesting part, though. Taking the 95 deaths in
Oklahoma out of the mix, there were 30 marshals killed in the line of duty in
the American West. There was a grand total of ONE killed in the North –stabbed while trying
to arrest a deserter from a Russian ship in New Jersey.
And there were 56 killed in the South.
Most of these men died in Tennessee, Kentucky, northern
Georgia, and North Carolina. And most of them were killed by moonshiners,
either while serving warrants, transporting prisoners, or in ambush. (Two were killed by the Ku Klux Klan during the federal government's efforts to suppress that terrorist group in the early 1870s, one in Tennessee and one in Mississippi.)
Actually, several marshals who died in Oklahoma were killed
while raiding stills or trying to arrest bootleggers (remember Rooster Cogburn’s
testimony in True Grit?) The circumstances were slightly different, though. All
sales of alcohol were forbidden in Indian Territory; in the South, it was not
the sale or private distilling of alcohol that was the problem, it was the fact
that no taxes were being collected on it.
Farmers making their own liquor was a longstanding
tradition- in fact, at one time it had been more a general rural tradition than
a specifically Southern Appalachian one. Turning your grain into alcohol made
it easier to store and transport, and brought more money. The first federal tax
on a specific item was on whiskey, which led to the Whiskey Rebellion in
Pennsylvania in the 1790s. That tradition had remained strong in the Mountain
South.
After the end of the Civil War, presidents Grant and Hayes
stressed the enforcement of tax laws on whiskey as a way to pay down the war
debt. This led to what was known as the Moonshine Wars of the 1870s (and later,
as well). Federal agents started sweeping through the mountains, forcing
licensed still owners to pay taxes and shutting down unlicensed ones. Most of
the Mountain South had been pro-Union during the war, but during and after
Reconstruction there was a growth of ex-Confederate sensibility in the region,
and in this case it was exacerbated by federal “outsiders” trying to control
what had become a mountain tradition.
Which led to the surprising fact that –if you take Oklahoma,
a unique case, out of the equation –if you were in the federal marshals service
in the late 19th/early 20th century, you were statistically
almost twice as likely to be shot by Southern moonshiners as by Western outlaws
(in reality, of course, this would depend on where you were serving).
Oklahoma and the Mountain South had something else in common
besides violence (and Cherokees). I’m speaking of public reaction to that
violence.
As I mentioned earlier, at first the Five Civilized Tribes
were exempt from allotment. To clarify, allotment, made government policy by
the Dawes Act of 1887, meant that control over Native lands would be taken away
from tribal governments and instead each Indian family would be given (allotted)
a small farm. For most tribes, this resulted in a lot of land being left over,
previously under control of the tribe. This “leftover” public land, controlled
by the federal government, was opened to settlement.
As more settlers poured into Oklahoma, many of them eyed the
prime lands still controlled by the Five Tribes. Those settlers, and the governments
of neighboring states, immediately started proclaiming how unfair it was that
all this land was under the control of “wild, uncivilized savages.” But wait,
one might say, the Five Tribes were exempt from the new law because they were “civilized.”
Many of them operated modern businesses and spoke perfect English. Well, many
Americans started saying, if they’re so doggone civilized…. Why is it so wild
there in the Nations? Why is there so much violence and lawlessness? And it was
impossible to argue that there was no violence, because there definitely was.
The true reason for it, of course, was the complicated legal situation in which
the Five Tribes had been placed by the federal government, but no one (aside
from the Indians) was saying that. Rather, the violence was being used as a
justification for the government to come in and take over… and to redistribute the
Indians’ resources to white Americans.
Meanwhile, in the Mountain South, northern investors and
their southern partners started expanding industry after the Civil War. New
railroads were built –the antebellum Southern railroad system had existed primarily
to link cotton plantations to harbor cities so as to ship their product
overseas –and that led to new businesses. In particular, lumber and coal mining
started to boom post-Civil War. Before the war, most of the coal mining had
taken place in northern Appalachia, in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.
Once new railroads extended into the southern mountains, coal mining became a
viable operation.
However, a lot of southern mountain folk were hesitant –or downright
unwilling –to sell or lease their land, or even the mineral and timber rights
to it, to these new businesses. They were, in effect, “holding up progress” due
to a strong affinity for their own land and traditions.
At the end of Reconstruction (which was officially over
after the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877) there was a clarion call
among progressives in the former Confederate states for a “New South” –one that
was open to industry and business (other than just cotton), and was modernized.
Southern mountaineers –who had always been presented as the ultimate frontier
heroes (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, even Andrew Jackson if you think about it)
–were standing in the way of that, and the economic benefits (for some) that
would come with it.
Therefore, just like newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and
Missouri were doing with the Five Tribes, papers started focusing heavily on the
violence of the Moonshine Wars as evidence that Southern mountain folk were
backward, wild, and uncivilized. They especially latched onto the Hatfield and
McCoy feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border, with papers all around the
country taking it up.
In the 1880s, therefore, the national image of southern
mountain folk changed from that of rugged, self-sufficient frontier heroes to
what we now call the “hillbilly stereotype” –violent, ignorant, wild, savage,
lazy, dishonest, and incompetent. That is a far cry from Davy Crockett.
“Hillbilly” became shorthand for a group of people that it
was okay for everyone else to make fun of and look down on (which is still the
case –watch reality TV at any random time.) But more to the point –just like those
“wild” Cherokees –hillbillies were both violent and backward, mentally incapable
of knowing what was in their own best interests, and of controlling their own
resources. So, just like in Indian Territory, it was okay for government and
private business interests to come in and make those decisions (especially
concerning resources) for them. By the 1920s and 1930s, by the way, Appalachian violence and the need to suppress it had expanded to include striking coalminers (watch the movie Matewan.)
Ned Christie, the “Cherokee outlaw”, and moonshiners in
Southern Appalachia were both resisting what they considered to be a foreign
government, and the act of their resistance reinforced the idea that they
needed to be more firmly controlled (I think it could be strongly argued that
the Cherokees had a lot more justification than moonshiners who didn’t want to
pay taxes –my point is not the justification, but the mindset.) In both cases,
this led to control of their natural resources passing out of their own hands.
The federal marshals, of course, were just doing their jobs…
a hard and thankless job, made more dangerous by the circumstances of their
times.
(by the way, to have the last portion of this piece essentially set to music, listen to the song above: "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." The song was played in each season finale of Justified, a TV series about a former coal-miner turned Deputy U.S. Marshalin Appalachian Kentucky.)
Submissions for the 8th Annual WF Peacemaker Awards are now being accepted for works originally published in the year 2017.
Qualifications:
First time in print must be between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2017, no reprints or revisions. Limit of 2 entries per category.
Books and short stories may be published in any country in the world (submissions must be in English) in print or electronic format. Electronic submissions must be made with Kindle/mobi or Word/text files. WF reserves the right to decline any submission for consideration of an Award.
Authors, agents, or publishers may submit a work for consideration of an Award.
At least three entrants in a category must be received during the submission period for an Award to be presented.
Novels and short stories must be set in the time period between 1830-1920 to be considered Westerns under WF guidelines. Time periods beyond the 1830-1920 traditional western focus may be included in submissions as long as the periods outside of the 1830-1920 span constitute no more than 50% of the story. At least 50% of the story MUST TAKE PLACE in the 1830-1920 period. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Nominees for the WF Peacemaker Award will be announced on 05/15/2018 and the winners will be announced on 06/15/2018.
The WF Peacemaker Award will be awarded in four categories:
Best Western Novel – Any novel published during the award year set in the appropriate time period (1830-1920), 30,000 words and higher. There are no format requirements. The novel may be a hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, or eBook.
Best Western YA/Children Fiction– Any fiction written for ages 1-17 published during the award year set in the appropriate time period (1830-1920). May be a hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, or eBook.
Best Western Short Fiction – Any short story, novelette, or novella published during the award year set in the appropriate time period (1830-1920), 500 words to 29,999 words. There are no format requirements. The short story may be published in any publication, print or electronic.
Best Western First Novel – Must meet the same requirements as Best Novel, and must be the author’s first published Western novel. If the author has published novels in any other genre they will not disqualify the author from the Best Western First Novel Award competition. Submissions for Best Western First Novel may also be submitted in the Best Novel category in the same year.
Procedures:
If sending print form, one copy of the work must be sent to each judge (3 per category), and the Awards Chair for a total of four, accompanied with the appropriate form.
Electronic versions should be emailed to the Awards Chair, James Reasoner with the appropriate submission form. The electronic submissions will be distributed to the judges by the Awards Chair. All entries must be postmarked or received via email by midnight, CST, January 15, 2018. Judges should not be contacted by any entrant concerning their entry during the consideration period. Doing so may result in disqualification of eligibility for the WF Peacemaker Award. Works submitted will not be returned after the awards have been announced. There is no fee to enter. There will be no exceptions made to the submission procedures, for any reason.
Links to forms to include are at the bottom of the list of judges. You will need 4 copies for each printed entry, one for each judge and one for the Awards Chair.
I recently returned from a visit to Texas, Kansas City, and points in between. I stopped at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, as always, plus did a lot of exploring of the back country of Texas, particularly the Hill Country.
One place I stopped was Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, outside Fredericksburg. The is the spot where Texas Ranger Captain John Coffee Hays supposedly held off a whole horde of Comanches, single-handedly. However, over the past years, more and more historians have been questioning whether the fight took place as legend has it, or if the fight even took place at all.
I did notice this visit that the Ranger Museum removed the diorama of Hays atop Enchanted Rock, and there is no mention of the fight at the state park. After making the rather strenuous climb, I agree with the historians who claim the fight, if it happened, did not take place at the summit of Enchanted Rock.
First, there is no cover at all, meaning Hays would have been exposed to Comanche arrows and bullets from all sides. He would have had the advantage of the high ground, but that's it. Unless the attacking Comanches were the world's dumbest Indians, and went after Hays one at a time like the bad guys in Walker, Texas Ranger always came at Walker, all they had to do was rush him. He would have been swarmed and overwhelmed in less than five minutes.
When I got back down, I spoke with some of the park rangers, they said the general consensus is that, since it is a fact there were Rangers and Comanches in the vicinity of Enchanted Rock at the time the event took place, there probably was indeed a fight, but it would have taken place at a lower level, or on one of the other nearby lower rocks. where there is cover. They also believe that Hays probably was not alone in the fight, except perhaps when it first started.
That's your piece of myth-busting for this month. See you in August.
Ranger Jim
Saturday, July 8, 2017
Sorry to miss you all this month, but I'm sitting with my three grandchildren and relearning the Civil War (Gettysburg) and Revolutionary War through their eyes. The soldiers in the red shirt, the grey shirt, and bearing the colors are mine. See you next month with a one-room schoolhouse blog article.
Julie A Hanks, Ph.D. aka Jesse J Elliot
At six years old, there's not a lot of
life experience to build stories around, so you rely on TV shows and comic
books and stuff your mom and dad read to you when you were younger. That's the
raw material you throw into the air when you go outside and make up your own
adventures with whatever comes down. And, if you're lucky, there's a dog
around, somebody like Boots Prosch, who adds that secret ingredient, that dash
of real world experience, that will become so important later on when you sit
down to write.
He was Cavendish to my Lone Ranger, Joker
to my Batman, roving Hyborian Age monster to my Conan.
He was twice my age with ten times my
wisdom, a friend and first mentor. A border collie whose origins are lost to
obscurity, Boots belonged to my grandma and grandpa and lived on their Nebraska
farm all of his twelve years. Dad thought he was the son of a neighbor's dog, a
big fellar called Shep. Somebody else said Boots showed up as a stray, a pup
barely weaned tumbling in on the gully-washing waves of a spring thunderstorm.
From the very beginning he inspired stories.
In my first memories, he was a working
dog, a responsible farm hand. With Boots around, it was easy enough to buy into
the trained antics of Lassie or Rin Tin Tin. Even Snoopy's imaginary escapades
didn't seem quite so outlandish when compared with the equally improbable
antics of Boots. Every morning he was left by himself to stand watch at an open
yard gate while my grandpa fed silage to two dozen cattle. Doesn't sound so
tough with the cattle more interested in breakfast than rushing the gate? Think
again. Boots didn't watch for escaping beef. His job was keeping in three dozen
feeder pigs that also shared the yard. And brother, he was good at it.
He could climb ladders. He would carry a
thermos of coffee by the handle when Grandma took lunch to the field. He loved
to play fetch. With rocks.
He was a tough ol' guy.
But gentle too. I called him
"Bootie," and he answered to it naturally enough. In after-school
roughhouse, he taught me how to take a punch (a head-butt, really) and how to
duck and weave. My afternoon dodgeball coach, Bootie eventually made me king of
the third-grade playground.Our contests
of "Get That Dog" or "Bootie's a Kitty" were good-natured
if seemingly fierce to friends or relatives who didn't know the score.
He never bit to break the skin, but from a
distance he mauled me. I never hurt him, but always came away with fistfuls of his
shedding black and white coat. We played hard and fought fair, always clear
there were boundaries we shouldn't cross: he wasn't allowed in the house. I
wasn't allowed near his food dish when he was eating.
And he was a trusty sidekick. He loped
along into the woods, trailed me through the corn fields, chased my bike on
dirt roads. And all the while, I talked to him. Sharing hopes, worries,
dreams.
Making up stories.
Boots taught me the difference between the
real character of a dog, and a dog as a character. Watch almost any family
movie or flip through a young reader book and you'll see plenty of the latter.
Dogs penned in as emotional fodder, put through their paces (or killed
outright) by reprehensible hacks with too little understanding of real canine
nature. Boots never saved my life. Neither did he die heroically. Or
tragically. He never foiled a real life crime or tracked down a villain. Unlike
his family friendly counterparts, he didn't molly coddle kittens. Bunnies and
squirrels, he killed.
He was a real dog.
As different from other
dogs as people are different from each other. He was an individual with his own
life.
Through his everyday actions, he taught
friendship. And loyalty. And forgiveness. Watching him guard the cattle gate, I
learned about responsibility. Watching him kill a squirrel, I learned about
nature. We spent a few years together, but I've kept him with me always, and he
shows up in the characters I write. He lives on as an old man who knows all the
hidden truths in "Joe Dokes" and a crusty old saddle pard in HOLT
COUNTY LAW. He's part of a ten year-old kid, Frog Carpenter, in the Jo Harper
young reader novellas, and in "Branham's Due," he's a dog.
After Boots, there were other dogs. Each
of them taught me something. Each of them had personality and quirks that show
up in my writing. There was Tuffy, a German Shepherd feared by most of my
friends, who only bit the people who asked for it first (and I can recall a
half dozen of those, including myself). There's Fred Bogart, a basset hound who
was the most self-willed of them all. And Moses McGee, another basset, as
different from Fred as could be, who taught me real patience. They all show up,
and will continue to show up, in the writing.
But it began with Boots, and I can't
imagine writers who never had a similar companion. Thinking about it, maybe
it's why the witches and wizards and magicians of folklore and fairy tales
always have cats or birds or some sort of familiar. It's with just such a
companion where the magic begins.
In my Holt County stories, Deputy Sheriff Whit Branham is friended by a dog named Leonard. This story, Leonard in Jail, was directly inspired by Boots Prosch. Read it here, and please let me know what you think.
After growing up on a Nebraska farm, Richard Prosch
worked as a professional writer, artist, and teacher in Wyoming, South
Carolina, and Missouri. His western crime fiction captures the fleeting history
and lonely frontier stories of his youth where characters aren’t always what
they seem, and the windburned landscapes are filled with swift, deadly danger.
In 2016, Richard roped the Spur Award for short fiction given by Western
Writers of America. Read more at
www.RichardProsch.com
Forgive me, dear readers, as I am traveling all week and have not had time to type a single page. I hope you enjoy this repeat blog post, which first appeared in August, 2014. VM The spark of a story presents itself at the strangest times. While I’m standing on the tattooed bride’s side of the crowd at a beach wedding. Sitting in my car at a railroad crossing watching rusty freight cars trundle by, wondering where they’ve been. On a cross-country flight, seeing the snowy peaks of the Rockies below. Wiping melted red popsicle from a child’s face.
That’s always the easy part for me…the spark. It sputters into a vague story line with one or two distinct though as-yet unnamed characters. Then comes that terrifying beast we writers must all face: the blank page. The pulsing cursor. The “where do I begin?” It’s easy to get uptight about the first line of a story, what with rampant warnings that we must grab the reader’s eye (or, more realistically, the publisher’s) from the get-go.
There are various schools of thought on book beginnings. Start in the middle of an action scene. “By the time Hamby heard the sing of Firemaker’s arrow, his lung had been pierced through.”
Lace your first sentence with mystery. “Every time I see a Bonneville, I remember the janitor’s daughter, Amy Lynn.”
Start with a surprise. “Gertie Jones was dismayed to learn that no one –absolutely no one – would consider killing her husband for less than five hundred dollars.”
Graham Greene slyly began his book THE END OF THE AFFAIR with a line about beginnings of books. “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
And that, to me, is the secret. Don’t waste all day worrying whether the first line sparkles or grabs or propels. It’s like entering a revolving door. If you bolt through it, or freeze mid-step, or stop to clean every smudge from the glass, you’re dead. However, if you just take a few nice comfortable strides, then suddenly you’re inside.
You can always come back and sharpen things up later. Maybe halfway through the book, a completely different opening will fall from the sky like a coconut on your head.
Still don’t believe it’s that easy? Here’s a when-all-else-fails trick I learned from an older writer. Just look around the room and pick an object. Now write your first line.
Let’s say it’s a pencil.
“Jack had no choice but to write his fake suicide note using a paper towel and a two-inch pencil stub he found under a sofa cushion.”
How about a lamp shade?
“There was a strange woman standing with my father, but her face was hidden behind the glittering shade of a Tiffany floor lamp.”
Think of your story, or your character. Then put your finger on some small detail that connects that character to every day life (or at least the particular day you're writing about). Once you have that object, you can apply all the devices of surprise, mystery, or action you want. The fact that you are mentioning an article familiar to the reader adds instant intimacy. We all know the frustration of writing with a pencil nub. And, as any seasoned mistress will tell you, lamp shades are terrific places to hide behind.
Hey, it’s a start. And starts lead to stories. And that’s what we’re all about.
Writers look to landforms to evoke deep emotions, as did
William A. Quayle:
“Long,
blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow,
at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every
mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was
the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations
of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a
rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting
to be blessed.” The Wild Muir: Twenty-two
of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures (2013)
