Good beginnings

San Francisco literary agent Nathan Bransford (a blog I discovered through the indispensable Moonrat) was running a competition last week for opening paragraphs for a novel.  I had been thinking I might have a go myself, but was caught out by the very brief window for entries.    It may be just as well.  The event was really intended for people who already have a completed novel to peddle - rather than for dilettantes like me who just knock off isolated first paragraphs for fun once in a while.  [I have, in fact, been toying for a while with an idea for a 'novel' to be called An Anthology Of First Paragraphs.  Don't tell me someone's already done it!  Borges, maybe?]   Also, I'm afraid, Mr B's tastes seem to be not at all in tune with my own.  Frankly, I thought his 10 'winners' were 10 of the least engaging that I'd read.  Not badly written, but trying just a tad too hard; not naturally winning of reader involvement. There were many, many more that I personally preferred, from the couple of hundred submissions I glanced through (but christ, he had over 2,500 entries!  Respect for wading through that lot!).  His choices, I felt, were all a little bit too self-consciously 'literary' (a common vice, I find, in 'creative writing group'-crazy America), a bit over-elaborate, straining too much for descriptive effects or distinctive quirkiness.  Not one of them gave me much idea what the rest of the novel would be about.  And not one of them really inspired me to want to find out.   It's a fascinating exercise, though.  Do check out as many of the entries as you can.  Then compare with Nathan's top ten.  You can also read his comments on his selection process, and the opinions of his blog readers on what makes a good first paragraph.   Pondering this last question myself, I feel it's too complicated an issue - and with too diverse a range of possible 'answers' - for it to be worth trying to formulate any set rules.  But I know a good one when I see one.  Or, I know what I like.     I had a quick look through the books I have in my apartment (not that many, alas) to try to find an example or two.  Breakfast at Tiffany's might have been a contender, I thought; but when I dipped in to remind myself, I found the first paragraph (establishing the setting of the narrator's first apartment in New York) to be just a bit too leisurely, almost ponderous.  I much prefer the brisk immediacy of the second paragraph (but perhaps that's partly because we all know Holly Golightly now?): It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again.   One of my absolute favourite opening paragraphs is this, in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman: Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.  Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded.  He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place.  It was he who told me to bring my spade.  He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.   Amongst the Chinese novels I have, only Zhou Weihui's Shanghai Baby stands out as immediately arresting.  The book overall is a disappointment: it uses sex too cheaply for titillation (well, don't we all...?), there's no real plot to speak of, and the narrator is too shrill and self-centred to be good company for long.  But there's a wonderful verve and self-assurance about this first paragraph (and credit, too, to the translator Bruce Humes for capturing this voice): My name is Nikki but my friends all call me Coco after Coco Chanel, a French lady who lived to be almost ninety.  She's my idol, after Henry Miller.  Every morning when I open my eyes I wonder what I can do to make myself famous.  It's become my ambition, almost my raison d'être, to burst upon the city like fireworks.     Any recommendations, readers?