I’ve been reading Stephen King for a long time. More often than not, something he gets very right is the narrative voice. I’m going to pull apart the opening chapter to take a look at how he does it here. This section is taken from the Amazon ‘look inside’ text.
When seeking advice for a submission, you’ll see a lot of people talk about a killer first line. I get that, grab the audience from the very beginning. Is this a killer first line, though: ‘I’m sure I can tell this story.’ At first read, it seems rather bland. The lack of certainty is what gives a spark of interest. Is the doubt due to capability or permission? It’s perhaps the second sentence which is of greater importance: ‘I’m also sure no onw will believe it.’ By using similar phrasing, the two sentences are paired, but this one now supersedes the first. Now we have the element of strange. We expect something unbelievable, something incredible. It’s simply done, but it’s an effective way in.
The next element in that first paragraph is also an interesting one. The narrator describes themselves as a ‘newbie’. Now we all know Stephen King is anything but a newbie, so what he does here, is make a clear division between the narrator, and himself. This is no longer Stphen King telling us a story, it’s a narrator of King’s creation telling a story, something person, something that happened to him. Already, I’m with him. I want to know his story. That didn’t take long at all.
There’s something else going on here too. I’m not far at all into the book, so I have no idea if it’s a motif or just something on this first page, but the idea of telling a story, the idea of story itself, is important. Given that it’s called ‘Fairy Tale’ that seems significant to me. We’ll see how that element develops.
The next two paragraphs are using the same trick. Pondering where to start can only work if the writer has uncertainty about what they’re doing, so the purpose of that first paragraph becomes clearer here. Because he’s unsure how to do this, he can speculate about the best starting place: is it ‘the shed’, is it ‘Mr Bowditch’, is it ‘the miracle’ or is it ‘goddamned bridge’? Of course, now I want to know about all of them. You can bet I’m going to want to know what’s in the shed, who Mr Bowditch is, what the miracle is why the bridge has the epithet ‘goddamned’.
In three paragraphs, King has interested me with the character and his narrativ voice, and hooked me with story elements even though nothing has actually happened. Damn.
We finish the opening page with a short two-line paragraph, something that links all of these events and establishes their importance. The reference to a ‘shackle’ suggests how inescapable these events are, and I’m be damned if that shackle isn’t locked around by wrist, too, and it’s going to remain there until I find out about all of these things.