As I wrote earlier, I sometimes begin a new session of classes with a lesson I call Beginnings. And so I did again with the new winter class in Newburyport. Rather than going to the local bookstore to look for terrific openings, I checked books that either I, my son, or my daughter own. I did remarkably well in finding strong, intriguing opening sentences. When I typed them up in a list to hand … [Read more...]

Once a year or so, I teach a lesson in my adult writing classes called Beginnings. (I’ve written about this before, here and here.) I scour bookshelves—my own or the local bookstore’s—in search of excellent opening sentences. It’s not that easy. Many opening sentences, of fiction and nonfiction, are at least good, but too many are ordinary, and few really grab me. So as my fall teaching session … [Read more...]

A student and I exchanged book recommendations recently, in which I didn’t like the ending in either book, and my student, Brian, didn’t like the ending in one of them. The book we agreed on was The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell. The one we didn’t agree on was Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. Up until the last few pages, I loved Esme Lennox. I have used the opening paragraph … [Read more...]

I often begin my fall classes with a lesson called Beginnings. I choose opening sentences from several works of fiction and nonfiction, and then discuss with the students what we can glean about the books from those first sentences. For example, from the opening of Anne Enright’s The Gathering—“I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, … [Read more...]