Alphas

What happens at the beginning? How do you start?

Maybe you meet someone on the street: a stranger, perhaps, or someone you knew long ago. Someone who knows you from when. A when you don’t want to be reminded of: that’s why you moved to Paris. (As in The Dud Avocado.)

Or you’re baking cookies. Entering a yearly ritual. Going through the lists, checking the cupboards for ingredients, running out to the store, coming home, setting out the butter to soften, turning on the oven, measuring out the sugar. What thing goes wrong, on the first page, that makes this a story instead of a journal entry?

The problem standing between me and beginnings (me and any part of a book, really) is that every thing feels derivative: something somebody else wrote. As in, wait—how did Madeleine L’Engle do it? What was so good about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, anyway? What was the plot, the mysteriously entrancing plot, of Possession? How can I make my words do what those words do? And how did Tamara Pierce create that sexual tension between George and Alanna? I remember the scene—they met in the castle library before she went off to war, he disguised as a monk, and he stole a kiss—not the words (In the Hand of the Goddess). The words were rather ordinary, not that special.

But for many years, that was one of my favorite scenes in any book.

It’s the fact that the words aren’t special that continually surprises me. When I write, or think about writing, there’s this pressure to be poetic—to write richly and memorably—but many memorable, lovely things aren’t memorable or lovely because of the words. Or not because of any one individual word. Most books that stick, they stick in the mind because of their emotional eloquence. The words can be ordinary—they just need to stay out of the way.

Sometimes the words are amazing, special, eloquent, and powerful, and then you have a perfect book. Housekeeping, say. But that’s rare. And not even usually necessary.

But how do you get over that pressure? The compulsion to be “poetic” prevents one from seeing and transcribing something rich, unusual, and emotionally eloquent. Because “poetic” often means vaguely pretty, rather than words that tell the meaning of, say, a cup of sugar, listing on the kitchen counter, its contents unsettled so that some has spilled into a little pile beside the cup, after a woman has just run from the room.