Fiction Writing Blog Assignment #2 - Story Beginnings

I don't really know how to describe my feelings on story beginnings. There's not any one thing I like about them. If I enjoy the way the story/book starts, it compels me to read more. That doesn't mean the story or book will hold my attention or enjoyment permaneantly, however. I've come across plenty of books or stories that had interesting beginnings, but failed to keep me wanting more. The most recent book like that being The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. Alternatively, if I don't like the beginning, I may not be deterred from a story or book, if I like the writing style or characters. If the story continues to not live up to expectations, that's when I may drop it completely. Beginnings are a strange thing for me, I don't know why or if it's just me, but that's just how I am.

That being said, we had to look at the beginning of Jhumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter".

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years. 

 “It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar’s. She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble. 

She’d come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her other hand. “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.” 

“When I’m here, you mean,” Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since January he’d been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in India. “When do the repairs start?”

“It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?” Shoba walked over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn’t celebrated Christmas that year.

From the first five paragraphs of "A Temporary Matter," we get a clear indication of the characters, the setting, and the inklings of there being trouble between the story's main characters, Shoba and Shukumar. The characters are human and completely relatable.

The story beginning I chose to compare it to is Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", a book that I've been meaning to read for a while, but just picked up. It starts:

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in face, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were. They now filled his house. He read about many different kinds and finally noticed bugs outdoors, so he concluded they were aphids. After that decision came to his mind it never changed, no matter what other people told him...like "Aphids don't bite people."

They said that to him because the endless biting of the bugs kept him in torment. At the 7-11 grocery store, part of a chain spread out over most of California, he bought spray cans of Raid and Black Flag and Yard Guard. First he sprayed the house, then himself. The Yard Guard seemed to work the best.

This is a very different story beginning than the one that we saw in "A Temporary Matter". In "A Scanner Darkly", there is no clearly defined main character, the only character we have is "a guy"; the setting is unknown other than the fact that it's set in California, which is incredibly vague; and the main conflict of the story isn't depicted, only a problem a character is having at the given time. The beginning is, overall, very mysterious and, personally, makes me want to know more about what is going to happen next.