Elements of Fiction (65)
Element 65: Curiosity
Here is another close relative to both Opening and Attention. If you can grab the reader’s Attention and stoke his Curiosity with your open paragraph, well, if you know how to follow through, you might have a masterpiece on your hands.
I think that Sol Stein would agree based on this quote, “The ideal goals of an opening paragraph are: To excite the reader’s curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship; to introduce a setting; to lend resonance to the story.”
Then he goes on to say this, there these are Stein’s italics, “Suspense is achieved by arousing the reader’s curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible.”
Also from Stein, “A craftsman like Cheever will season even the most conventional beginning with just enough that is unconventional to rouse the reader’s curiosity.”
And Stein wraps his take up with, “If one understands the principles of intriguing the reader, one doesn’t need decades of experience.”
I also think E.M. Forster’s view is worth pondering, “The story [action through time — what happens next] is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us. The story is neither moral nor is it favorable to the understanding of the novel in its other aspects. If we want to understand that we must come out of the cave.”
Then he goes on to elaborate, “He [Walter Scott] had the primitive power of keeping the reader in suspense and playing on his curiosity.”
“She [Scheherazade] only survived because she managed to keep the king wondering what would happen next.”
“Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.”
Curiosity, says Madison Smartt Bell, is “The very human appetite to know the outcome of any narrative, for better or worse.”
Here’s William Zinsser’s take, “Your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.”
And I think we’ll leave it at that.
Happy writing.
© Wolfstuff
