Craft Talk: Beginnings at the End of Year
How to start; plus, a prompt, and a look at Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That."
Sometimes—often? always?—starting is the hardest part: whether that is getting to the desk, or closing your email, or writing the first line, sentence, paragraph. When I was working on The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, figuring out the first chapter of the book took an entire year, because there were so many questions to answer—one of the largest being how to build a voice capacious enough to be at once narratively authentic and able to pivot authoritatively to research that I was including. From there, the writing more or less flowed. Beginning matters, because in the beginning is the end, and all that.
There’s a little bit of hidden wisdom in the fact that we call the start of the book both a beginning and an opening. I often encourage students or writers I’m editing to think of the opening of a piece as either a window or the moment when the curtain rises to reveal a stage set. In that moment, the reader’s vantage on the material is established. From this window onto a house, you can see a kitchen where family gathers; from that, a lonely basement subletter, making it work in the gloom. Or: as the curtain rises on this production of King Lear, you see, immediately, that it’s been set in a contemporary apartment stocked Eames chairs and Danish modern furniture; or that the set is austere, deconstructed . All these details matter, because they create a vantage and a mood—and from here, all else flows, whether you are sustaining or rupturing that mood. The beginning, that is, opens onto the work.
I always end up thinking about beginnings at the end of the year, a headlong, frenetic, and occasionally mournful time; c.f. carols like the achingly melancholic/sublime “In the Bleak Midwinter.” The end of the year, like the end of a chapter, offers an opportunity to start again, a chance to open onto something new.
Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” from her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, has one of the best beginnings and openings I have read: one that perfectly sets up the ground the essay will tread, the ground it is leaving behind, over and over. No wonder that it is a perennially taught and read essay; despite her politics, which were more conservative than her acolytes might realize, Didion remains perennially taught and read, and it’s because of the way she mastered form in the personal essay, form that invites the reader in.
“Goodbye to All That” is about the moment when you move from being very young to not quite very young; it’s about leaving a city—New York—but also a kind of life behind. Part of its appeal is the glamour of it all: Didion is describing a particular kind of high life in the city, working at Vogue, going to literary parties, a life I remember from when I was a young assistant and then editor at The New Yorker. But she is also describing in terms that make it seem like could be anyone’s autobiography: she makes the stakes broad, so that the piece is on its largest level about moving from one part of a life to another, from one self to the next, forming the layers of personhood that make up the complex, archival self we end up becoming. She makes the stakes feel large and engaging by opening with a kind of claim I called a “formulation” in an earlier post: starting with a snap of perception, rather than narration: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” I wager that without that opening line—that memorable formulation and act of thinking about experience, rather than just narrating experience—the essay wouldn’t be as famous.
In fact, this essay is a great example of a writer using the “palimpsest voice” — a voice that dramatizes the different layers of selfhood—that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Let’s look at the first (long) paragraph of the piece, which has many of the hallmarks of a great opening. I’ve put in bold some of the moments where she is doing things I’ve talked about in previous posts—offering a formulated perception, indicating that the writer self is distinct from the previous self “in scene,” and more:
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Didion does five things here that are crucial to many openings of a personal essay.
This paragraph is an opening as much as a beginning. By setting up themes and tension, using the techniques below (palimpsest voice, thinking on the page), Didion primes the reader to want to continue: We know that we’re just getting to the crux of the matter; we feel suspense, or tension, about the elusive change that the piece is going to describe. In other words, the opening is not just a “grabby” or vivid scene that pulls you in but fails to fully set up the themes; it is fully on point.
Didion establishes herself thinking on the page. Imagine, for a moment, that the essay began with the second sentence. (“I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me…” It would still be a powerful opening. But it would lack the essay’s concerted commitment to thinking on the page through sharp, beautifully written perceptions that stay with us. It’s that thinking that makes this an essay and not an act of mere remembering or memoir.
She establishes herself as credible by talking about what she cannot know or identify: “but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended.”
From the second sentence, she establishes that this isn’t just an essay about her; it’s about a creeping moment of disillusionment in America, a moment we all become “no longer as optimistic as” we once were. She gets at this by dramatizing what it is like to be very young, with a head full of stories. We’re all creatures of the popular culture around us; here, Didion connects her own account of being young and full of longing with fairy tales, popular songs. This is an essay about her life; but it is also an essay about a moment in the culture, when the culture became disillusioned with itself. Watch how she moves, deftly, in the second sentence from herself to an archetype who stands in for us all : “I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”
She establishes a reflective, self-scrutinizing voice—evoking that palimpsest self—that builds the trust of her reader. Here, in bold, are the ways she evokes that she knows more now than she did then:
When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.
The phrase “programmed by” tells the reader everything she needs to know: this is not going to be a naive, nostalgic look back at arriving in NYC. Instead—deliciously—it’s going to give us the feeling of nostalgia and hopefulness while also critiquing it, interrogating it.
There is so much more to say about this beginning: the musicality of the paratactic syntax, the variation in sentence length, the intelligent skepticism that goes hand in hand with fully crediting the sensual intensity of being young, the yoking of the individual to the social, and more, and more. But hopefully this gives you a good reminder that when we start, we are also trying to open—onto our themes, onto discovery, onto a space we didn’t know we’d be able to reach.
And here’s a prompt: Write the opening of a piece you’ve been mulling using these techniques;
Begin with a one-sentence formulation/aphorism of your own composition that gets to—or plain out articulates—the thematic crux of your piece. (e.g. “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”)
Use the palimpsest voice somewhere in the first paragraph (deftly), establishing the relationship between present-day writer and past self: “I can remember now…”
Connect the narrator or essayist to the social world in which she lives (“programmed by…”)
Write a very long, paratactic sentence followed by a very short one.
Include the phrase “As it turned out…” (from the second paragraph of “Goodbye to All That”)
Have fun, and let me know where it takes you!
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Meghan
My effort, inspired for a few minutes this morning, very early, before the world woke up:
Stepping into parenthood is stepping into the startling size of what you don't know, and of what you didn't know that you don't know. In the year since my son was born, my gaze has been wrenched away from what, in my naivete, I expected, a simple planet of paternal love, to look at a universe of strange objects I can't explain. And that sometimes frighten me. Even these sentences were composed in the throws of one such strange object. I sit next to our bed in the dark, up much to early because I know my son will wake soon anyway. I scribble half a line on the back of a napkin in a state of panic because I know how little time I have. This is the only kind of writing I can do anymore, answering prompts instead of attending a basic physical need. The door creaks. He sees me, grins, and comes bounding in with a hug. A joy erupts from inside that makes my face tingle, and yet I am angry, too, at the interruption after 18 months of not writing, and I am mortally ashamed at the anger. What to call this cauldron of joy, anger, shame, frustration, and pride, this supernova of feeling? "That's your car, yes. Your blue car. Did you poop?" Am I a good Daddy? Can I ever be.
Friends and family of our hero assured him he would be the best of Fathers. He might be, but as it turns out, all their definitions, and his as well, were wrong.
It's a little spooky that, once again, your Craft Talk is timed perfectly with the writing challenge I'm facing. I am about to return to the introduction of my book, and I've been feeling overwhelmed by the challenge of setting up my voice and where this memoir will go. I'll give your prompts a try!