In
her hut in Poto-Poto, the poor quarter of Brazzaville, the
feticheuse, smiling at us, knelt on the floor, drew out a handful of
cowrie shells from the cloth bag at her waist, and cast them across
the raffia mat.
Lary
Shaffer and I, despite ourselves, leaned forward on our wooden
stools, studying the meaningless pattern; the shells, obviously much
handled, shone like old ivory in the glow of the paraffin lamp. The
feticheuse stopped smiling.
“One
of you,” she said slowly in French, “is very ill, right now.”
I'm
going to list the reasons why I think this works so well.
Firstly,
before even reaching the end of the first sentence, we want to read
on, if only to find out what a feticheuse
is. Later, the reader discovers that a feticheuse is a shamaness; the
word derives from the French for “fetish,” and fetishes loom
large in the second half of the book.
Secondly,
when we read “The
feticheuse stops smiling...,”
we
know something is wrong. You want to find out what it is. Who is ill,
and what's wrong with him?
Thirdly,
the beginning of the book is sprinkled with clues that we're not in
safe, familiar Western territory. The lady lives in a hut; there's a
raffia map on the floor; the tools of her trade include cowrie
shells; there's no electricity, just a paraffin lamp. Readers of
travel books want the exotic, and O'Hanlon delivers the goods from
the get go.
The
message here is that you don't need to start your story at the very
beginning. Find an engaging episode (“the hook”) that'll draw the
reader in, and then backtrack if explanation/elaboration/elucidation
is needed.
In
my next post, I'll discuss an instance where an author had the raw material for a great hook, but failed to use it where he should have.
No comments:
Post a Comment