Chapter 87: The First 100 Words
And so the day had come for my students to deliver the first 100 words of their stories. Not a lede and nut graf (more on that later) but their first 100 words.
While I do not believe in workshopping stories – students critiquing each other’s work – I am a big believer in audience testing. So I read the first 100 words of their stories aloud. Then I ask one question: does it work?
The answers come not always in words but in gestures, and the best of those is a simple nod that says more eloquently than any words can convey, Yeah….
As I wrote in an earlier chapter, the idea of the first 100 words lies in this calculus: People read at the average rate of 200 words a minute. Which translates into 3.3 words per second, or 33 words every 10 seconds. Fleeting though it may sound, ten seconds of reading time is an eternity. (Think of how long you spend standing in front of a painting at a museum. Ten seconds? Fifteen? Twenty?) The connection between image/story and viewer/reader has to happen quickly if it is going to happen at all. Which means that as a writer you don’t have a lot of time to waste before a reader stops and turns away, never to return.
I’ve used this approach over the years, with hundreds of students – a large enough sample size to draw several conclusions:
1) it is almost always the case that if you can nail the first 100 words, the writing that follows will be far easier.
2) when those 100 words don’t work, it is generally the case that the writer is unsure of what he or she wants to say, and so hesitates to commit to a direction in the story.
3) if you as a writer come to end of those 100 words and are unsure of what comes next, you need to go back and write a new 100 words.
All of which is to say, the pressure is on you, the writer, to grab me and make it impossible for me to turn away. You have 30 seconds.
I walked into class and the anxiety was palpable. How could it be otherwise? The fifteen students had spent a month reporting their stories – and in many instances seeing their stories morph into something completely different. They had filed weekly reporting memos, each week adding to their growing docs, which allowed them to track their progress. They had also written the best scenes they had so far reported – a way to get them thinking of the scene as the building block of narrative.
Now, however, felt like a moment of truth: their classmates would hear what they had written. More than one had prefaced their submission with something along the lines of “here is my terrible/dreadful/sucky 100 words.”
They had no reason to apologize. Because, damn if they didn’t hit it out of the park.
No two stories opened the same way – nothing formulaic going on here. Instead, each student accomplished what feels easy only in hindsight: they had seized control of their stories. They had established their authority as the teller of the tale. They wrote in a way that said, quietly but clearly, “I know.”
And better still, they did it quickly – no wasted words, or clutter. They had a sense of where their stories were supposed to land.
Some examples:
It was late. The worst of the rain had passed. So Don and his wife decided to sleep. They got into bed, snapped off the light, and heard their dogs nestle into their familiar spots on the floor.
It was well into the night when the tide shifted. The current was tracked by sensors glowing in the darkness near the tide gates outside of town. But few were awake to witness the waters rise, until the Hackensack River consumed the vast marshlands along its shores—the heads of the tall grass barely bobbing above the flood.
By the time Don knew what was happening, the river was bubbling up through the floor.
***
“We need to practice our kiss for the wedding,” Joe said, pulling Jami close. Should his hands be pressed against her cheeks or wrapped around her waist?
Now, Jami couldn’t remember which one he had decided that day. The monochrome photograph shows them pressed against one another with Joe's hands softly resting on her neck, thumbs tenderly grazing both of her cheeks.
Some people's hearts just stop beating, the doctor told Jami. This was enough of an explanation as the fact remained— Joe was dead— leaving her widowed as a mother of two, at the age of 26.
***
At 75 years old, Kathleen Christensen throws a party for her dolls once a year. She dresses the men in formal wear and the women in gowns and they spend the evening chatting with one another about the year that’s passed.
“I have them talk to each other and you know some of the dolls are dating each other,” she said. “Some of them are married to each other and some of them have kids, and they have lives.”
***
Nonfiction short stories. I could just as easily cite another twelve. That was certainly the sense of the room. Every 100 words elicited nods and smiles. Why? Because there is something reassuring about encountering a story told by a writer who, by dint of the key words and images, conveys the unmistakable sense of knowing what comes next. In fact, each student knew just what was to follow their first 100 words.
What would happen as they continued to write would not be easy; it never is. But in the spirit of this newsletter, my hope for them was that the writing would bring them moments of joy, even if they were fleeting. I believed it would. After all, they had earned it.
They had worked hard to put themselves in that position, to experience the sensation of having such command of the material that they could see the connection between, say Point A and R and back to G. That is the moment when the writing becomes a means, not the end.
The means through which to tell the story you – all of us – want to tell.
*
A follow up to last week’s poll on nut graphs. We got 49 responses and I will confess the results surprised me. Twenty-nine replied that nut graphs did NOT stop them from reading narratives. Twenty said they did. I’d have predicted the reverse. So what conclusion to draw? As a glass two-thirds full person, I seek the positive and it is this: readers want, NEED to know where they are being taken. If it takes a nut graph to do the trick, so be it.
I will never be a fan of the big heave of a nut graph in a narrative but then that is a matter of taste. For me the greater pleasure is in the subtly rendered anchoring of the story – much like the ones my students did in their first 100 words.