Author: Kelly Caldwell

Forbes magazine recently published its list of the 15 best opening lines in fiction, and I’m a sucker for these lists. I read them all. I text them to friends. I should probably be more discerning. But I’m not.

And yet. This one irked me. All 15 were the same openers everyone has named for the last, like, 40 years: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Toni Morrison’s Paradise. (Usually, these lists choose the first line from Morrison’s Beloved, so this one did mix it up.Sort of.)

It’s not that I disagree. Gabriel García Márquez nailed it with his opening to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s just—there’ve been more recent great first lines, too. Poets & Writers magazine even features a sampling every issue in its Page One column. This month, they included the first line from Hala Alyan’s memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: “I dreamt of a lyrebird once, before I knew it existed.”

But also, Gotham teacher Dalia Pagani recently made me more aware that the literary community tends to over-emphasize what she calls the Big Hook Opening. These are what my journalism colleagues would call grabber ledes. Something heart-stopping and dramatic, rendered in a vivid, preferably short sentence.

Most of the choices on the Forbes list would qualify as Big Hook Openings. As would some of the nonfiction perennial favorites, like Cheryl Strayed’s grabber lede to her essay “The Love of My Life:” The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.”

The Big Hook Opening is terrific when you’re writing about death and adultery, or people turning into insects overnight as they sleep.

Dalia’s point, though, is that it’s hard for a story to live up to the promise of the Big Hook Opening. And more importantly, not every story is meant to. Some stories are about two friends out for a walk. A woman misses her dead mom and feeds apelican.

In “Fortunate Sons,” a recent story by Gotham teacher Cleve Lamison, a father and son walk to the roof of their apartment building. Something dramatic does happen, eventually, but mostly, it’s a father-son story. And it starts like one: “By the time we reached the 11th floor, my chest heaved like I was a drowning man chasing the surface.” A middle-aged man, regretting that he didn’t exercise more. His son teasing him for being out of shape.

If it sounds like so many conversations you’ve overheard in the farmer’s market or the subway, well, that’s probably intentional. Cleve’s story is a family story. It’s also about what happens when the father and son get to the roof. And why they’re taking the stairs. So starting in the stairwell, at the 11th floor, with a family moment, is the right approach, in the right place. It works.

In her essay “The Heart Is a Torn Muscle,” here’s Randon Billings Noble’s lede:

Overview

     Your heart was already full, but then you saw him and your heart

     beat code, not Morse but a more insistent pulse. Oh yes.That’s him.

     That one.

“Overview” indicates this is a hermit crab essay mimicking a Web M.D. entry. Then, the first sentence mimics a racing heart; the last three sentences mimic a regular heartbeat. Read it aloud. You’ll hear it. It’s the right lede, for that story.

Listen, Dalia and I aren’t coming out against Grabber Ledes/Big Hook Openings. I love that lede of Cheryl Strayed’s. I would never suggest Kafka open Metamorphosis in any other way.

I’m just saying, don’t reach for the Big Drama, if it doesn’t suit your story. Not every story should open the same. And you’re not the same as any other writer. When the right lede comes along, be open to it.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

There are a few bits of common writing advice that writers, editors, and teachers like me say so frequently and with such certainty, they become canon. They aren’t suggestions so much as they’re laws.

We forget that if writers adhere to them too closely, they can do more harm than good.

I had to re-examine one of them recently after my former student Atash Yaghmaian visited my class to talk about her book My Name Means Fire, coming out from Beacon Press this October.

The aphorism we’re revisiting? “Kill your darlings.”

“Do you ever write something and then you’re like, “Oh, this is shit,” and then you rip it up?” Atash asked. “Please don’t do that.”

“Keep it. Just keep it. Because it’s a part of you who’s expressing yourself. Keep it.”

“Kill your darlings” isn’t exactly wrong—eventually, every writer has to cut chunks out of their stories. If we didn’t, every story would be 5,000 pages long.

The problem is that too many writers start cutting too soon. They delete paragraphs, pages, chapters before they know what their story is about.

In Atash’s case, she didn’t so much kill her darlings as she avoided writing them altogether.

“The first five drafts of this book were about this girl running away from Iran, from war, from the Revolution, and making it to America, and that’s my story, but that’s not my story,” Atash said.

It wasn’t her story, because it left out her internal life. It left out how she survived.

She survived by dissociating into a beautiful inner world, one that she called The House of Stone. It was a beautiful place. It was incredibly creative. And it saved her life.

And she still wrote around it. Through five drafts.

“I was terrified,” Atash said. “Even my [therapist] colleagues would talk about people who [dissociate] as though we are freaks. So, I hid it. When you would read my book, you would just read this happened, then that happened, and it was engaging, sure, because revolution is engaging. But people kept asking, ‘How did you survive?’”

Once Atash wrote the rest of the story, her interior story, not only did her book get better, but her writing changed.

“I let different parts of me come through the pages and say whatever they needed to say without me deleting them,” Atash said. “Writing taught me to be really accepting of all the different voices I have and the different ways I write. Writing was the gateway to understanding myself.”

Now, when Atash sits down to write, she holds nothing back in her first drafts. It’s “purge, purge, purge” into one huge document; later, she’ll open a new one to stitch together a new story, like a quilt.

“First drafts are all foundations,” she said. “Foundations are not pretty. But we build beautiful castles on them, beautiful books, articles, love notes, essays. We need a good strong foundation, so we all get to say what we need to say.”

The saying “Kill your darlings” is really about editing, about being brave enough to check your ego and do what your story needs you to do, to tell a story that’s true.

But you can’t delete your way to a great story. You have to build it.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

It’s graduation season, and you know what that means: For the next six weeks, high school and college campuses will be clogged with people stopping in inconvenient places, staring off into the middle distance, misty-eyed.

They’re only sort-of present in those moments—part of them is visiting the past. It’s involuntary, likely to happen when you return to a place where you did some of your most important growing up, (an alma mater, for example), or you find yourself gazing out on a sea of young people ending a big chapter of their lives and beginning a new one. These are moments almost guaranteed to clobber us with nostalgia.

Nostalgia, and the stories it inspires, get a bad reputation, because so often they don’t have much point to them. It’s your mom driving you around her hometown, pointing to a house that looks exactly like every other house, and saying “That’s where your grandma grew up.”

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about how nostalgia is actually really useful to writers, because the magazine of my own alma mater asked me to write an advice story on how to turn your college memories into actual stories.

Basically, they paid me to indulge my own nostalgia while advising writers on how to make it matter.

Along the way, I learned some things about nostalgia that are downright fascinating:

• Humans are (as far as we know) the only species that can feel nostalgia for the future.
• Nostalgia is contagious — you can spread yours to people, even if they don’t share the memory.
• It cultivates empathy.
• It makes us likely to seek out connections to other people. We are even more likely to ask for help.

Most importantly for writers, when we sink into nostalgia, far from being a self-indulgent waste of time, we’re making meaning of our past.

And all of that—the warm fuzzies, the vivid details of memory, the empathy, the reaching out to old friends, the meaning—all of it can be used to create more vivid, more emotional, more meaningful stories.

“Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion,” wrote the novelist Michael Chabon. “Most truly and most meaningfully, [it] is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, … of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios.”

Most of the memories that flood us with nostalgia involve other people, according to researchers. Which means that when you explore why some memories carry you away while others don’t, you can better understand your relationships at the time, both to the people in your immediate orbit, as well as to humanity more widely.

Take this nostalgia-inflected story, “You Still Wouldn’t Trade It For Another Lap Around” by Abby Alten Schwartz. Graf after graf reads a lot like this one, memories of her childhood interwoven with the experiences of others her age.

At a party the summer after you graduated, you got high and turned to your friends and said, “Do you ever think about nuclear war?” and then you all busted out laughing and for years after that someone would bring it up and it still cracked you up in an embarrassing way. But really, the threat of being wiped out suddenly (or worse, surviving) was the biggest danger you faced next to strangers or hitchhiking or Ouija boards at slumber parties.

Alten Schwartz shares that moment with her friends at that graduation party, but the vulnerability in it, when she shared her fear, connects her memory and her story to many others in her generation, it makes the story more meaningful, because it’s no longer a “do-you-remember?” but a story of growing up under a shadow, and surviving.

OK, writers, your turn. I’ve put together an exercise for you to stir and hopefully harness your nostalgia. Don’t be afraid to indulge in it. Remember it not only gives you grist for stories, it can help make you a better person.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty