And the Stupendously Ultimate Winner Is!!

Thanks so much to everyone who entered the 5th Sort-of-annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge coinciding with the release of Jacob Wonderbar and the Interstellar Time Warp! Please do check out the trilogy. It’s fun for you! Fun for you too! Fun for you, person in the fancy sweater in the back! Yeah. Especially you.

Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow
Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe
Jacob Wonderbar and the Interstellar Time Warp

Now then. The winner of the 5th Sort-of-annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge is…

At the bottom of the post.

First up, as always, the reason I chose these finalists. As I’m sure you can tell by the length of the list of honorable mentions, I was extremely impressed by the entries, and not just the ones who were named. There were lots and lots of stellar entries and they were a pleasure to read.

My feelings about first paragraphs can basically be summed up by this tweet:

A first paragraph is like starting a dance with a reader who can’t hear the music. You have to guide them until they find the rhythm.
— Nathan Bransford (@NathanBransford) February 7, 2013

A first paragraph is a surprisingly important part of an entire novel, because it has to do so much. It eases the reader into the novel. But the reader literally has no idea where they are. The paragraph has to carefully guide the reader through the paragraph and into the world of the novel. Flow is important, crucial details are important, and voice is important.

As usually the finalists represented a wide range of styles and approaches, but I feel like they all accomplished this task extremely well. Here’s a bit more about each of them.

Sue Curnow:
The Mazda hit ice. Carter cursed, fought for control, lost it in kaleidoscope swirls, and the vehicle hurtled down a steep bank, jamming Tori against seat and headrest. Terror strangled her heart, breath refused to come and let out her screams. Stillness as the car stopped, engine running, headlights shining on pristine snow. Relief caught laughter in Tori’s throat, until she realized where they’d ended up. The Coldwater River. Confirming her fears, ice cracked loud as a pistol shot. Carter undid his seatbelt. Tori depressed the button on hers. It refused to give despite her frantic efforts. Carter opened his door, got out the car, then bent to peer back in. “Goodbye, Tori,” he said.

As longtime readers know from my page critiques, I’m not always a fan of high concept openings and in media res action. But this paragraph really works. In addition to clever turns of phrase like “kaleidoscope swirls,” this paragraph stands out to me because it has just the right amount of detail and it builds through tension through the short sentences The crash is told through a collection of images, but it doesn’t feel disjointed and I never felt lost. And of course, the parting shot opens up thousands of questions.

Robert Wyatt:
One of the hoariest adages in booklore is that a tale should never commence with a description of the weather, but what is to be done if you wish to tell about a wraith found at your doorstep in the midst of an electrical snowstorm? Skip to the good, warm part in the middle? No. You must tell it as it was.

Crystal:
Peter had seen strangers in the road before, but there was something different about this man…something sinister. Most people passed on their way without a thought for what might lie on the opposite bank of the river that ran beside the road, but this man, in his tattered cloak that fluttered restlessly around him, stood bent and still. He seemed to be staring at a spot on the edge of the road, as if he knew that was where a bridge should begin.

I really admired this paragraph for its steady build-up and the tension that the author creates with the solitary man, capped off with perhaps my favorite turn of phrase in the entire competition: “as if he knew that was where a bridge should begin.” Such a fantastic evocation of mystery and possibility.

Saille:
It was a good day until fire started falling out of the sky. The sun was just up, and the leading edge of the spring burn was behaving exactly as the kindlers had predicted, which was a relief, because this was Thus’s first year as an outrunner. Ahead, he could hear the high whistles of his herd of capas, and see their broad silver backs parting the grasses, leaving gleaming, vee-shaped wakes behind them. They moved toward the firebreak restively, but without panic. He supposed they must have grazed their way back across it in the night. It didn’t matter. This was the one day that Thus and the other stewards didn’t need to be responsible for their small allotments of the People’s larger herd. A capa could keep out of the way of fire more easily than the People, because capas weren’t responsible for putting it out. He still felt a wash of protectiveness, though. He’d delivered some of the young for the first time this year, turning their tapering heads and soft, wrinkled paws to lie correctly along the birth canal before drawing them, dark and shining, into the world, where the rhythm of their mothers’ hearts gave way to the susurration of the grasses.

It’s very difficult to ease readers into a foreign world, but this one works very well. I don’t know what a capa is, I don’t know what an outrunner is, and I don’t know what a kindler is, but I never felt lost because I knew enough to picture what was happening and felt grounded with the descriptions and the authority the author builds.

Todd Zuniga:
Delia walks over to the couch where I’m sitting, asks me, “Seriously, why’d you manslaughter your baby?” I tell her she already knows I don’t know. “Huh,” she considers as she crosses her arms. Her hair a tangle of grey curls. Maybe, maybe-not Delia has room to judge: she manslaughtered her mother, who was eighty-three.

I really liked how this paragraph kept me off balance while not feeling overly forced. This paragraph could be from many different types of novels, but I like the ordinary-feeling approach even as I came away feeling very curious about the rules of this world.

Cheryl W.:
Time is a funny thing. People often discover this quite young. You can be in time, on time, buy time, waste time, but you can never trust time. Even though some folks will claim time’s on their side, or their ally is time, or they have time, time doesn’t know them from any other of the trillion souls that live and breathe upon the earth. Time is oblivious to us and likes it that way, thank you very much. “Time,” as most people know it, is purely a manmade manifestation of numbers on a watch or shadows on a sundial, even radioactive isotopes oscillating rain or shine, but Time itself is as elusive as the future to a dying man. We desperately seek to control it, manipulate it and force trains to run to it, but as we never understand from whence the universe came or where it’s going, we’re lost in contemplation of Time’s vagaries. For instance: the past can be as alive to a person as the present, seeming to exist as one within the eye of the observer, just as Einstein posited. To those who insist upon it, time – the present and the past – can be experienced simultaneously. Bartholomew Lewis was just such a man.

Lots of people tried the very difficult “let me muse about the world for a sec” approach to the first paragraph, whose degree of difficulty is approximately 11.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. Cheryl W. accomplished this with some very skillful writing and some genuinely interesting observations. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard, and yet I came away intrigued.

Chris Bailey:

I would have given Mom a good-bye hug, but StepThad’s arm rested across
her shoulder. Like the two of them were glued together. Double hug or
nothing.

It’s amazing how much Chris Bailey is able to accomplish here with just three short sentences. Such a believable voice, a lot of backstory told through detail alone, and “StepThad!”

elizabethmarianaranjo:
She was a striking girl, all shadow and stillness. Judith watched her carefully. Twenty years teaching middle school had taught her the subtler ways to approach them, the ones who wore solitude like a shell. If you look away, they disappear. But if you look too close, they withdraw. You have to learn to look sideways.