When the curtain goes up, how does a writer open?

What are his first words on the page?

(This article is Part-5 in a series; for Part-6, go here; for Part-4, go here.)

When I was 19, I was reading VERY thick beef stew with major dollops of metaphysical German gravy.

Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger.

Long-winded?

You wanted to stagger from the dining room table before you even got to the first point these guys were making.

So when I happened upon DH Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and his chapter on Edgar Allan Poe, my head lit up like a Christmas tree when I read his opening lines:

“Poe has no truck with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red Brothers and Wigwams.”

BANG.

Lawrence then follows up with: “He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own psyche.”

Out of the blue, I was reading writing I’d never seen before.

Without a fraction of a pause, staring at the page, I thought, THIS IS WHAT I WANT.

THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TO HAVE.

THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO WRITE.

I was propelled. No more slow high breaking waves and looming cloudbanks of Euro epistemology.

When he wanted to, Lawrence could nail you to the wall.

Henry Miller begins Tropic of Cancer: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

He dives into Tropic of Capricorn this way: “Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord.”

Only a completely normal person with a completely normal mechanical mind could stop reading at that point.

Hesse begins Steppenwolf: “The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.”

One of HL Mencken’s most famous opening lines: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Here is another gem of his. It wasn’t an opener, but it should have been. In 2024, it could stand as the lead-in for a thousand articles:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Openers. A writer needs them. They blast away the chronically overcrowded attention of the reader.