Concerning beginnings. And sometimes hobbits.

              This week’s blog is about beginnings, my beginnings, both in books and in life. I decided to jump start my brain by comparing the first chapters or prologues of some of my favorite books, and was very surprised to find that, although I had already read these books once before, they didn’t all start out the way I had remembered them to. I have always been under the impression that a book should start with a punch. I guess that I just hadn’t considered what that punch could be. The way I remembered all of the books that I read always began with some traumatic event. Something would always happen in the beginning of the book that made me feel…something that I needed resolved so that I could sleep peacefully at night. And so, I would continue to read that story and go on that emotional rollercoaster so that at the end, I would feel fulfilled and relieved that all of the friends that I had just made were safe and sound. However, when I actually went back and read just the first chapter or so, I came across something both wonderful and surprising.

              Several of the books I went back and looked at did in fact start with an immediate battle of some proportion, begging me to continue on; books such as Eragon by Christopher Paolini, or Homeland by R.A.Salvatore. Even Monster by A. Lee Martinez begins with a fight between a blue guy and a yeti in a grocery store. However, a vast majority of the beginnings that I remembered didn’t actually start out that way. They started as a very soft and mellow description of the world, or of the characters that I would soon befriend. A few of them would even go as far as a few whole chapters of nothing much happening at all. Then the conflict would be revealed a subtle way. Somehow, this was every bit as captivating as an epic battle and I would read on. Yet, how is this so? I used to think that the only way to capture a reader was by making them immediately ask the question….what are they going to do now? Who is going to fix this? I am beginning to think now, that I was so captivated by great beginnings like “Concerning Hobbits” in Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien because by the time I had finished reading the several small chapters about hobbits, I found that I was totally and completely in love with them! So the book was actually even more important to me because I felt that in every adventure I went through and was a part of, was one more step towards protecting these little fuzzy beings that I had learned to love at the very first.

             This new perspective might seem less profound to a more experienced writer, but again....this is what I started blogging for, to force myself to write and to pay more attention, and most of all to learn. I believe that this two week project has done just that. My point of view about beginnings has been dramatically rearranged, and now, I have a good grasp on the beginning of my own book!

“When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before.  You see more in you than there was before.”  ~Clifton Fadiman