Rendezvous With Writing
by Priscilla Bettis Facebook@ PriscillaBettisAuthor Some of my favorite scene openers are philosophical and full of abstractions. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina). But if used too often, these sorts of scene openers lose their impact and risk losing the reader’s interest, too. I was helping a writer friend out with a manuscript critique, and he had started scene after scene with Tolstoylike, quotable, cerebral sentences. “The night began before any darkness touched the sky” and “The private conversation no one heard had a long prelude” and “The fracture among the faithful announced itself most plainly not in theology but at supper.”
These kinds of sentences fail to launch the scene’s action or even give the reader concrete words to ground the scene, which is okay once in a while. But after many chapters’ worth of these introductory sentences, their biggest function is to call attention to themselves.
