To begin
How do authors begin their work? How does one chose a single word, sentence, paragraph, or page to properly introduce the amalgamation of thousands of words to come? The words below come from three works and represent three decisions of how to begin.
“My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. Father used to dub me Shapka , for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that. It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.”
-Jonathon Safron Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“By the grace of God, my kinfolks and I are Carolinians. Our Grandmother Bower always told us we had the honor to be born in Carolina. She said we and all of our kissing kin were Carolinians, and that after we were Carolinians we were Southerners, and after we were Southerners, we were citizens of the United States. We were older than the Union in Carolina, and our grandmother told us never to forget that fact. Our kinfolks had given their personal consent to the forming of the Union, we had voted for it at the polls, and what we had voted to form we had had the right to vote to unform . We knew of course what our grandmother was talking about, for our grandmother was an old Confederate lady—she was reconstructed but she was reconstructed in her own way, so whenever she got to talking about us and the grace of God, we said “Yes, ma’am” to our grandmother.”
-Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….”
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
