I blame SE Hinton.
When I was in seventh grade, we read The Outsiders in class and then went on a field trip to see a screening of the movie. The story is a classic, at least for me–and it was a first novel–and one of the reasons is a literary trick Hinton used. At the end of the first person narrative book, she has her central character, Ponyboy, start writing a book about his experiences. The first line of his book is the same as the first line of The Outsiders, bringing us full circle. It gives that opening line more weight, much more, than it would have had otherwise. I can still hear C. Thomas Howell scribbling while he reads out, “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the moviehouse, I had two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
It’s no “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Hell, it’s no “Rosebud.” But it’s memorable. It sticks in the mind.
As I sit down to start working on Revelation, the hurdle of the opening line mocks me. It insults my lineage. It accuses me of doing things with poultry that are illegal in the lower 48 states.
And I know it’s pointless. I know this is supposed to be my “shitty first draft”. I know I need to just write something, anything, get past it and get into the story, it can and likely will all be changed in revision. I should just lie back and think of England. But SE Hinton still sticks in my mind. I need to have a good opening line. Something that sets up the massive epic to come. Something that foreshadows something important about Daniel Cho. Something special.
This is, of course, just another way to avoid writing. First drafts are no place for art. I ground Unification Chronicles to a halt years ago by getting hung up on a similar literary trick (putting quotations from books written after the story at the start of each chapter to foreshadow what was coming up, which I blatantly stole from Jack McKinney’s Robotech novelizations). I know better.
Write, dammit.
One Comment
I’m curious how many wannabe writers SE Hinton inspired? I think I was in grade 8 or 9 when Outsiders came out in the theaters and I loved it since it has all the cool looking guys there and it was quite a total overdramatic movie but the seriousness was there. I loved SE Hinton books and at the time, I was inspired to write, creatively and although I never really pursued a career in writing, I guess, I’m still at it, writing, although for my own Palm/Treo blog but it’s in my blood. Maybe I’ve got way too much to write about.
Thanks for bring up Outsiders. Funny that I just watched the movie about a few weeks ago and noticed how much I kind of missed watching or seeing many years later.
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