Anatomy of an Opening: The Stand
Forgive me. I only finished reading The Stand for the first time earlier this week. I now want to pick up the uncut/extended edition and revisit it. Hopefully that won’t take me another forty years. As a novel, it has immediately shot right up to the top end of my Stephen King collection, and I’ve read rather a lot of them. Another sin, however, might be that I’ve not read Salem’s Lot. I’ll try to rectify that one this year too.
Anyway, as I started to read this novel at the back end of December, I was struck by how effective the opening is, and here I’m going to try to unpick why it works.
I took some screen grabs from Amazon’s Look Inside, and I’m sharing no more than anyone could reasonably go an read online.
This is the opening, and it’s a whole heap of nothing:
We have a place, we have people, we have inaction. As we continue through this first page, we get the names of some character and a bit of background about their town. It’s remarkable just how normal this is. The conversation is the kind that would have been happening all over America, and other versions of it in many places around the world.
It’s just five guys sitting around putting the world to . The normality of this is crucial. Little do they know that in just a few weeks, the world they’re trying to fix will be as good as gone.
King makes a structural choice not to start with the virus and its hideous effects. He chooses not to start with the dying man in the car. Instead he chooses normality, perhaps so we can then relate to all that follows.
Let’s move on to Stu Redman:
It’s page 2 of the book, and we get a massive info dump; we’re in Exposition City. Again, not a play from the how to make an engaging opening book. We might feel sympathy for Su here, but his circumstances don’t make him in any way unique. Perhaps that’s what makes him relatable. And it is Stu who is first to spot the change in this very ordinary situation. He is the one to announce that we are about to get our inciting incident.
Even this is not particularly exciting. The Chevy isn’t racing, it’s meandering, but that in itself is strange. Stu recognises this, and realises there’s something wrong with a vehicle at this time of the day with no lights, traveling at low speed, moving in such a way. We come back to the very normal conversation, even though the car is more interesting. The conversation continues for half a page. Tension is building as we wonder about the Chevy.
In this section, with Stu’s study of the car, the narrative seed is almost slower that the speed of the action in the scene, as all is described in detail. Look at all of the movement verbs used for the vehicle: pitch and yaw, lurched, bumped. Slow, steady, but continuous, it approaches.
Stu’s dialogue, notable his first is a call for action, but said mildly, nonetheless.
While he’s not your archetypal hero, he realises action is required:
So Stu’s actions avoid an explosion and save the lives of his friends (at least, for a little while).
The description that follows is vivid but never as destructive as threatened. There’s expectation, but it’s never met:
As readers, do we feel that we’ve not been given what we’ve been promised here? Perhaps, if what follows isn’t so much worse.
And what happens if the pumps aren’t turned off? Is there an explosion? Is Stu killed? Does the virus ever escape the car..? (Mind you, that wouldn’t be much of a novel…)
We’ve got a couple of things going on here that work really well. A lot of the bets horror is about how characters react to it, so King focuses on Norm’s reaction. He shouts and he vomits. From this, we know it has to be bad. Rather than telling us why it’s so bad right from the offset, by going to Norm first there’s delay there which causes more suspense. Next, we get the smell. When it comes to reading, primarily our sense of vision is used most, followed by sound. Smell is much more powerful as we only experience it when we’re close. We pretty much have to draw the horror into our bodies before we react, and therefore the reaciton is so much more visceral.
Next, Stu and Vic take a look inside the car, and we get our fist look at the effect of Captain Tripps:
Again, we start with the characters’ reaction rather than what’s inside. We get their disbelief through this, and only when they look again do we get to see it. Again, there’s a lot to pick out from this. Look at the varying sentence lengths, the impact of the very short simple sentence, “They were both dead.” We get a close focus on the physical effects of the virus – the colour and the size of the swelling to allow us to picture it vividly. But among that horror, another short sentence: “The woman was holding the child’s hand.” Horrific details have so much more power if there’s some kind of emotion there. The realisation that this is a mother and child, and at their last moments, they were holding hands is so much more powerful than any description. And only once we’ve had this emotional hit do we get more grim details. The “Thick”, “clotted” “mucus” is so much worse now, as are the “Flies [that] buzzed around them.” Stu’s character is developed further here too. We know he’s been to war, but this is worse. And again, we come back to the image that isn’t gore, that isn’t revolting: “His eyes were constantly drawn back to those linked hands.” That’s what matters here, horrible things that happen to people that care about each other.
We get more of the man, still alive, pulled from the car, contact with the authorities, but perhaps the most important line is that last of the first chapter. “It was ten after nine.” Of itself it seems somewhat unimportant, but that’s what makes it crucial: after our slow opening, with our characters sitting “idly” everything escalated pretty quickly.
You hear so much advice given to new writers to have an attention grabbing first line. I get that. It does help. It’s interesting to take a close look at a text that eschews that approach and goes for normality. The key piece of writing advice King does demonstrate here though, is start the story as close to the inticing incident as possible. A couple of pages in, we’ve got that Chevy full of death heading straight for one of our main characters. As soon as that door opens, we’re off. For me, it works well.
Let me know your thoughts.