Heard Myself Talk

When I started writing the novel that would become Tucson ’93, I didn’t consider the importance of a killer opening paragraph. I just knew where I wanted the novel to start and did my best to craft a scene that would get the ball rolling. I thought of it more like a kickoff to a football game. Sure, kickoffs can be exciting, but usually they are just a mandated act to start the action.

I’m glad I approached it that way, but looking back on it now, that sentiment seems quite naive. Of course the opening of a book carries an outsized importance. Especially today, when our attention spans are being shrunk to the size of a pebble, and the competition to capture that attention is fiercer than ever before. As an independent author, if my book can’t hook you within the first few minutes, you’re going to kick me aside to binge-watch a show, doom scroll, or flick through Reels. Maybe all three at once.

Another challenge with crafting a good opening to a book is that there are thousands examples out there of authors who have inevitably done it so much better. For this blog, I’m going to focus on three, which I am placing in the categories of “The GOAT”, “The GOAT from the GOAT”, and “The new GOAT”. If that sounds confusing, it is. But I think it’s going to be fun. Let’s get started.

The GOAT: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

 This is far from an original thought, but it just doesn’t get any better than this:

 "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

 No notes. It’s just perfect. Then you add the rest of the paragraph to the mix, and you know you’re on an E-ticket ride.

 “I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’”

There’s no point in trying to compete with something like that. To paraphrase Rusty Ryan, “it’s in Cooperstown.” More importantly, it perfectly tees up what’s coming next. It’s also a warning. If you don’t like this, you really aren’t going to like what’s coming in the next 220 pages.

The GOAT from the GOAT: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

As I’ve mentioned before, Murakami is my favorite author, and I had to pick an opening to one of his novels for this list. The first Murakami book I read (which took me a very long time) was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which starts like this:

"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta."

 Unlike “Fear and Loathing”, this opening cannot be more different from what’s coming next (I remember spending a lot of time in a well). It’s just someone in the kitchen boiling a pot of spaghetti. But the end of that sentence lets you know this is a Murakami novel. This isn’t just a person boiling pasta. This is a person who believes there is perfect music to listen to while you are boiling pasta.

I must admit that I couldn’t place that tune just by the title alone, but when I streamed it, I immediately recognized it and now believe that it is the perfect music to listen to while boiling pasta.

That’s why he’s the GOAT.

The New GOAT: Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack

This year, the book I’ve thought about the most is Murder Bimbo. It features an absolute liar of a narrator and a unique structure (which I don’t want to give away). It’s also an incredible commentary on the times we are living in, almost eerily so. The book starts like this:

“Fear flung me out of New York City. That helped. Metropolitan gravity can be a bitch.”

 What I like about this one is that it creates immediate momentum. The character isn’t just leaving; they were flung. That’s such a specific description, and to me, it was a warning sign that this story was going to take off like a rocket. And that proved to be true.  

Plus, the description of metropolitan gravity gives a hint of the character’s personality. 

Then again, maybe they are just lying.

And finally, Tucson ‘93

Let’s just get right to it:

 “I’m in a bad mood, but it’s not because I’m squatting on JoJo’s roof looking at his vandalized swamp cooler. The water pouring out of my faucet this morning was brown, like it had been for the past few months. According to the state of Arizona, it was safe to drink, but I’m skeptical. It took them twenty years to bring that Colorado River water down south to Tucson, and I know that shit only runs one way.”

In comparing this to those hallowed openings, I think it shares some similar characteristics. Like Fear and Loathing it establishes the setting right away (just in case the title of the book didn’t do that) but does so with a couple deep cuts that are very familiar to anyone who was in living in Tucson in the early 1990s (for more on swamp coolers, check out this blog and look for a discussion of the Central Arizona Project in a future post).

Like Murder Bimbo, I also think you get a sense of the character’s mood. He’s grumpy, and he’s convinced that Tucson, as Arizona’s “second city” got a raw deal. This combo of questioning authority while also being the underdog is a theme that weaves its way throughout the novel.

And while this opening paragraph doesn’t have a musical reference like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I make up for it in the chapters that follow. There may not be any tunes from Rossini, but there’s a great one from The Replacements.

As fate would have it, Tucson ’93 not only starts on a roof, but (spoiler alert) ends on a roof a week later. I hope you want to find out how that happens.

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See you on the flipside.

-BV