Let's get off to a great start

I hope to do some "close reading" of good writing from time to time as this blog progresses, and came across this opening paragraph from the novel Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane.

"Rachel was born in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. It was known as the Region of the Five Colleges — Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts — and it employed two thousand faculty to teach twenty-five thousand students. She grew up in a world of coffee shops, B&Bs, wide town commons, and clapboard houses with wraparound porches and musky attics. In autumn, leaves fell by the tubful and choked the streets, spilled into the sidewalks, and clogged fence holes. Some winters, snow encased the valley in silence so dense it became its own sound. In July and August, the mail carrier rode a bicycle with a bell on the handlebar, and the tourists arrived for summer stock theater and antiquing."

Considered holistically, this graf introduces us to Rachel through a description of a place, using a third person narrator who is channeling Rachel's memories.

Readers don't need writers to be stenographers, jotting down each piece of dialog, and they don't need writers to give them every detail of a setting or scene. But they DO count on writers to be curators of a sort, choosing from the many available images and discussions and situations and thus providing us with enough to help us imagine all the rest.

Notice that the graf begins with a rather brief subject-verb-object sentence. The following sentences then begin to lengthen and stretch to include longer series of descriptive details and eye-catching comparisons.

I often mention the power of three, as in three examples being just the right number to prove a point, and we see a great example of the power of three in that sentences that encapsulates autumn. 

The most unusual sentence is probably "Some winters, snow encased the valley in silence so dense it became its own sound." This juxtaposition of silence and the silence of the valley enveloped by snow is one of those sentences designed to make readers pause and spend some time considering that unusual silence.

Each sentence seems carefully constructed with loving attention to just the right detail. I can't say this often enough: how we BEGIN is so important in both setting the tone and scene, whatever our writing purpose may be, but it also establishes our ethos as writers and provides enough energy to keep readers wanting to learn more.

I rarely see a piece of writing that begins with an engaging start that soon turns to boring and mediocre. 

Spending extra time on our first few grafs is well worth the effort.