Grand Openings

Periodically, and especially when I start a new writing project, I look to other writers for … what?  Inspiration?  Assurance that written words can be important, entertaining, interesting at least?  Whatever the hope, and irrespective of my expectations, I have learned that reading the accomplished words of  other writers often can jump start the frozen cells of my imagination.  The fact that authors have created images and emotions that have remained in existence for years and that will continue to attract readers for decades somehow encourages me, props up my lagging confidence, and nudges me back to the blank page and a renewed commitment to The Story.  Here are a few examples of opening lines (in no particular order) that may carry me forward to my own first sentence, paragraph, page, or chapter.  Maybe they will do something for you, too.

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"For a time, they both held on to their lives, gasping softly, whispering feverishly, and bleeding profusely, their two minds far, far away from the cruel burrowing bullets that had left them mere seconds away from death.  Face to face, they spoke their last words in crimson-colored breaths.  Theirs was a withering language, one for which there are no living speakers."  Alfredo Véa, Gods Go Begging

"La Loca was only three years old when she died.  Her mother Sofi woke at twelve midnight to the howling and neighing of the five dogs, six cats, and four horses, whose custom it was to go freely in and out of the house.  Sofi got up and tiptoed out of her room.  The animals were kicking and crying and running back and forth with their ears back and fur standing on end, but Sofi couldn't make out what their agitation was about."  Ana Castillo, So Far From God

"There was a desert wind blowing that night.  It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.  On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.  Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.  Anything can happen.  You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."  Raymond Chandler, Red Wind

"It's difficult digging up the past, reliving what one had hoped to forget.  But one doesn't forget.  Ghosts don't leave us because somehow we won't allow them to.  We force them to stay with us, to walk by our sides, to both protect and terrify us.  If my writing comes out fragmented, some points not completely explained, some characters out of place, some incidents explained too much, forgive me, for that's how Vietnam lives in my mind.  Twenty years disfigures the faces, muffles the words, blurs the scenes, yet the stories remain honest, the memories sincere."  Daniel Cano, Shifting Loyalties

"Luisa and I found the child lying on his side in a fetal position.  He was about four years old, with curly, soft brown hair falling over his forehead, and partly covering his brows and long lashes.  Small, round and still showing those tiny dimples that baby fat forms around the joints, his left hand rested on his head.  He was wearing a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist, marking 3:39 in the afternoon.  Four minutes ahead of mine.  His right arm partly covered his face, pulling his T-shirt up over the roundness of an over-sized liver.  A soft, sleeping brown cherub, so like my daughter Tania, probably napping back home at that very moment."  Lucha Corpi, Eulogy for a Brown Angel

"They threw me off the hay truck about noon." James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

"Desmond Cormier's success story was an improbable one, even among the many self-congratulatory rags-to-riches tales we tell ourselves in the ongoing saga of our green republic, one that is forever changing yet forever the same, a saga that also includes the graves of Shiloh and cinders from aboriginal villages. That is not meant to be a cynical statement. Desmond's story was a piece of Americana, assuring us that wealth and a magical kingdom are available to the least of us, provided we do not awaken our own penchant for breaking our heroes on a medieval wheel and revising them later, safely downwind from history." James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat." Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Later.

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Manuel Ramos lives in Denver. His latest novel is Angels in the Wind: A Mile High Noir.