The day is starting under a smudged sky and  I’m happy to report rain arrived  last week–a lovely relief in our baked, thirsty part of the world. And autumn is in full swing–halleluja. Yesterday I walked along leaf-strewn paths on a small nearby mountain and while it’s covered mostly in Douglas fir trees, the big leaf  maples  were changing to pumpkin colors and leaves are strewn on the paths. So much change in the air.

I’ve taught at a lot of writing conferences so I’m not certain which east coast city I was in when I met Donald Newlove. He wrote two beautiful books that meant a lot to me when I first encountered them; Painted Paragraphs: Inspired Description for Writers and Readers and First Paragraphs: Inspired Openings for Writers and Readers. I haven’t read his  Invented Voices: Inspired Dialogue for Writers and Readers, but I just ordered a copy.

Most writing conferences include book signings and it was during such an event when I met Newlove. I recall gushing over Painted Paragraphs and First Paragraphs, my joy and appreciation at meeting a fellow word lover, and we later sat together at dinner. These days that would be called fangirl behavior. No matter. I learned more about him and we talked about the power of voice in writing. We agreed that voice in a story should be as identifable and distinctive as hearing a voice on the phone, even if many of us text more than phone these days.  His The New York Times obituary summarizes his long life, and I wish I could beam his love for writers, language, and stories through the ethers to you.

Over the years I’ve posted some of my favorite story openings here and plan to return to this practice. And I’ll discuss what opening paragraphs need to accomplish and why. One possibility for pulling in readers is to introduce an irrisistable character. Here’s the beginning of “Pharmacy”, a short story from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, one of my favorite books of all times:

For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.

The pharmacy was a small two-story building attached to another building that housed separately a hardware store and a small grocery. Each morning Henry parked in the back by the large metal bins, and then entered the pharmacy’s back door, and went about switching on the lights, turning up the thermostat, or, if it was summer, getting the fans going. He would open the safe, put money in the register, unlock the front door, wash his hands, put on his white lab coat. The ritual was pleasing, as though the old store — with its shelves of toothpaste, vitamins, cosmetics, hair adornments, even sewing needles and greeting cards, as well as red rubber hot water bottles, enema pumps — was a person altogether steady and steadfast. And any unpleasantness that may have occurred back in his home, any uneasiness at the way his wife often left their bed to wander through their home in the night’s dark hours — all this receded like a shoreline as he walked through the safety of his pharmacy. Standing in the back, with the drawers and rows of pills, Henry was cheerful when the phone began to ring, cheerful when Mrs. Merriman came for her blood pressure medicine, or old Cliff Mott arrived for his digitalis, cheerful when he prepared the Valium for Rachel Jones, whose husband ran off the night their baby was born. It was Henry’s nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, “Gosh, I’m awful sorry to hear that,” or “Say, isn’t that something?”

In her first two paragraphs, Strout’s description of Henry establishes his decency, steadfastness,  vulnerable but appealing insecurity, yearning, loss, loneliness, and grief that weaves through not only “Pharmacy” but every one of the book’s subsequent linked stories. These paragraphs describe so many ways I love Henry. I too, love the smell of the cold. Notice how we’re grounded in the story with Henry’s morning routine of opening the pharmacy to red rubber hot water bottles and his white lab coat.  And if you haven’t seen the brilliant adaptaion of Olive Kitteridge with   in the title role, I cannot recommend it enough.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart