Toni Morrison’s Jazz is, simply put, a masterpiece. The prose is spectacular, with a rhythm and life that demands you slow down and listen. The characters are incredibly real, layered, and interconnected, and like all of Morrison’s work, the story is as complex and idiosyncratic as it is realistic. Morrison shows her readers a handful of lives that we haven’t seen but, upon reading, seem incredibly familiar.
There are a lot of great lessons writers could learn from Jazz, but here, I’d like to discuss one I noticed as soon as I opened the book: how to write a great opening that sets the stage for the book and sticks with the reader.
While catchy openings are usually the domain of high-intensity genres like thrillers and epic fantasies, most every writer wants to open a story with something that grips their readers and pulls them into the story. With a little practice, most any writer can pull that off.
That said, an engaging opening isn’t necessarily a memorable one. You can catch a reader’s attention simply by opening a story with action or drama, or saying something quirky the reader hasn’t heard before. But, that sort of opening won’t necessarily hold a reader’s attention. Without something to get them looking forward, that catchy opening will be like a loud noise in a crowd; everyone will look for a few seconds, then forget about the noise and go back to what they were doing.
To hold a reader’s attention, you need to go a step further. You need to take that engaging opening and show the reader something important about your story. You can showcase your prose, introduce an interesting character in a dilemma, write a strong piece of plot-relevant dialogue, give a sense of “tone,” or do some good worldbuilding. But, whatever you do, it needs to draw the reader’s attention forward and leave them wanting to read more than just the next few pages. This can be by sparking questions the reader wants answered, diving right into a moving plot, creating unresolved, long-term tension, or just entertaining the reader enough that they want more before they’ve finished the first page.
As an example, let’s look at the opening to Jazz:
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him feel so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
Jazz, by Toni Morrison (Page 3)
Right off the bat, Morrison gets our ears pricked up. There’s a rhythm to her prose that you can feel in its first lines, and the punchy, almost dismissive “Sth, I know that woman” shows an jaded personality in her narrator whose familiarity with this sort of chaos catches the reader’s attention. The way she describes the husband’s love for the eighteen-year-old girl is equal parts weird, intriguing, and relatable… then we find out that he shot her, a twist that leaves us with a host of questions we need answered, which creates tension and pulls us into an already-active plot. At that point we’re hooked, but Morrison doesn’t stop there. We’re told that Violet went to cut the dead girl’s face in the middle of a church (which makes us wonder “why her and not the husband?”), then threw out all her pets. We’ve been given a handful of puzzle pieces that are each gripping enough on their own, and now the reader wants to figure out how they all fit together.
But, where almost any other writer would turn this into a kind of thriller/drama, Morrison sets the tone by layering this introductory paragraph with real depth and treating the violence as almost another day. It’s thrown into the middle of a sentence, bracketed by emotions as though the violence itself is barely worthy of a passing mention. Morrison even ends the paragraph on the tragic, but quiet mention of the parrot that says “I love you,” drawing the reader’s attention further from the violence and closer to the idiosyncrasies of real life.
All at once, readers have been introduced to gripping characters and Morrison’s gorgeous prose, a host of questions have been raised and, most importantly, Morrison’s choice to focus on the less dramatic details has given us a sense of the story’s “tone” and an indication of what it’s going to be about; emotion and depth, rather than excitement and violence.
So, what can writers learn from this opening? Well, mostly that it’s not enough to just get adrenaline pumping from the first lines. You need to tell the reader what sort of story they’re going to get, either by setting the tone or bringing up themes, characters, ideas, and issues that will be present through the whole chapter or the whole book. In a sense, your first paragraph is like an advertisement, a hint at what the reader will find if they choose to keep turning the pages.
To this end, you should have some idea of what sort of story you’re telling and which parts of the story are most important when you write the final draft of that first paragraph. You’ll want to know what combination of worldbuilding, characters, humor, or others storytelling elements drive your work, so that you can put the most important ones up front along with the questions surrounding them. Likewise, try to match the tone of your work. If you’re writing a slow, contemplative thriller, you may not want to open with an action scene, and vice versa.
At this point, drawing the reader in is partly a game of trust: you trust that the story you’ve put forward is one they want to read, and that they have an interest in the elements that you consider most important. That said, you should still work to make it as intriguing an opening as possible by following the points mentioned above.
Of course, there are exceptions to all of this, and these ideas are simply guidelines. Either way, I encourage writers to model their openings after Morrison, and show the reader what kind of story they’re going to get while drawing them in. It’s a hard line to walk, but it’s certainly worth your while.
Featured image courtesy of Kelly M. Lacy!
