The Opening Pages of a Hard-Luck Story

opening pages--the first three or four pages of a novel manuscript, usually the first page of a short story manuscript; the opening velocity of a story; archaic references: hook, narrative hook.

Before a novel or short story has any hope of finding its way into book, electronic, or periodical publication, it must pass the watchful eye of the literary agent and/or the acquisition editor. To accomplish this goal, the narrative must present an interesting character in a situation of confrontation, danger, discovery, or emotional quandary of significant enough degree to trigger some measure of concern. The writer who refuses to consider this calculus or who feels unable to execute it is at high risk of receiving a note declining the manuscript on the grounds that the reader had not been sufficiently made to care.

As observed by such plot-driven writers as Louis L'Amour, Frank Gruber, and Elmore Leonard, many novels and short stories, sent forth into the world as eagerly as hand-waving students wanting to impress their teacher with their knowledge of the right answer, do not always begin at the right place. Ideally, the opening pages plunk a character into a spot where the character is physically vulnerable--sometimes emotionally vulnerable as well. The opening pages also include some implicit agreement that the character will get back up and try again.

Often the true opening pages of a story are buried within backstory or other explanations which come forth more as unwanted-but-necessary descriptions rather than emotion-based circumstances. The net result is to present the reader with text book narrative rather than dramatic engagement. 

 The solution is often found in the revision process, wherein the true opening pages present themselves. How are these pages to be recognized? They are spare on description and backstory, sparer still on auxiliary verbs such as had, which yank the chronology from the present to the past.

Wherever opening pages are in the story's chronology, they are more effective if they appear to be happening in the immediate present. If they actually took place, say, ten or twelve years earlier, the reader will quickly adopt to the manipulation of the time frame. No convention requires fiction to be in strict chronology; chiropractic adjustments to chronology add to the senses of tension, suspense, and reality.


hard-luck story--a narrative which intends through its telling to evoke sympathy and compassion for the teller; a story in which one or more characters collide with an ever worsening pattern of setback and misfortune.


All stories have some kind of end-game goal, some intended effect on the hearer/reader. Is it laughter? Perhaps the author's intent is education, or irony, or reversal. Perhaps the narrative is offered in self-defense, or the adjunct of self-defense, excuse. As long as we're dwelling on the conditional perhaps, might be the intent of a story is to make the teller sound modest--moi?--or resourceful.

Surely one of the more plentiful among dramatic narratives is the hard-luck story or its close relative, the sob story. The purpose is to evoke or elicit sympathy for the teller, both in the nature of troubles piled on and in the way the load is borne by the forces of Nature and natural disaster.

You could say--and probably will, once you think about it--that The Book of Job is the classic hard-luck story, not only because of the trials visited upon Job but as well because of the capricious nature of the way the visitation was set in motion. Job happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when those polar representations of The Cosmic Forces got into a bragging and betting mood.

In more modern times, you could argue that an archetypal hard-luck story is found in a heavy contributor to Republican politics, being given a chance to go hunting with the forty-third Vice President of the United States. We all know how that turned out. That poor man will be known throughout history as the man who went bird hunting with the Veep. In Texas, where the incident took place, Republican school children will be allowed to stay home from school on the anniversary of that day, and boys with aggressive cases of facial zits will be able to say, "I went dove hunting with Dick Cheney."


You could also, if you wanted, put the majority of Americans of voting age as players in a hard-luck story because it was our hard luck to have at the helm of the ship of state a man more like Captain Ahab than the President of the United States, although there are those who would disagree with my literary analogy, reminding me of Mary Shelley's archetypal Frankenstein as the more appropriate fit. Dr. Frankenstein represents the force behind the Vice President of the United States, a man who once was more benign than he now is, having created a monster who has attached some seven hundred fifty signing statements to bills acted into law by the Congress. Mrs. Shelley's point was a moral one, in which hubris could create a monster.

It's our hard luck story that the forty-third President of the United States, with graduate work in hubris, was in over his head and the best we could think to do in the name of conventional wisdom was to wait his term of office out.

We will nationally remain at the wrong end of a hard-luck story as long as we continue to accept our status as victim.  

It Only Hurts When I Backup

I begin with a confession. Not many minutes ago, I urged the Toshiba Satellite laptop I am currently using to go be fruitful and multiply itself.

I was that angry with it.

I am using this four-plus-year-old laptop because my less than one-year-old Acer is off in that limbo known as Repair, a place to which CompUSA sends all still-under-warranty computers. In this limbo, my Acer will have a portion of itself re-soldered, thus enabling it to be connected to its AC power cord and then on to the greater glory of having its battery recharged. This is the second time my Acer has visited Repair for this very purpose. In all fairness to Acer, the problem has more to do with me, tripping over said wire than any significant design flaw.

It is true, however, that Brian Fagan, a devoted Mac user, pointed out that the new Macs connect the AC power supply to the body of the laptop with a magnet rather than the male/female prong-and-sleeve coupling found on most PCs.

"Finals time," the CompUSA repairman said, investigating my Acer. "Students get spacey studying for exams and trip over their power cords. Biggest single injury this time of year."

"Look about you," Brian Fagan invited me with a twitch of his mustache. "You will never see a person in the repair line with a Mac computer."

This is the same Brian Fagan who has announced to me on several occasions that the Cro-Magnon got short shrift, which probably means he is brewing up a new book--a book on the Cro-Magnon. But that is another matter; what is of matter is that Brian is given to making assertive statements.

Steve Cook, also a devoted Mac user, and used to Brian's assertions, smiled before nothing, "Shelly has his computers repaired at CompUSA, where people with Macs don't go."

Subsequently, I got an email--with attachments--from Liz Kuball, a forward from Mac, advertising Adobe's recent release of a new version of Photoshop that would allow her to install it on one of the Mac computers listed in the attachment. An emerging photographer, Liz has slathered for the time when Adobe produced a version of its program better suited for the new Intel Macs. In an exchange of emails, we both wish-fulfilled over the possible configurations for a new Mac, each resolutely pledging to get the maximum use of our respective Dell and Acer, not even considering a switch to Mac until "sometime in 2008."

Actually, the Toshiba is not to be faulted for what it allows, the biggest problem being I cannot introduce MS Word into its innards because of some defect in the CD/DVD drive. The great irony is that I have, lurking somewhere under the bed, a Mac G-4 Powerbook, given me by Brian Fagan after he switched up to a more recent model. The G-4 worked very nicely, thank you, the last time the Acer was off being done to, but it appears to be hors de combat, which gets me at long last to the point here, best expressed a week or so back by Sam Kuper, during a visit from his chores at the Darwin Project at Cambridge University. PCs have some qualities Macs don't; Macs are better designed than PCs in some areas but not in all areas.

A vocal and enthusiastic fan of fountain pens--my Ancora is great for writing first drafts, ditto my Conklin, Mont Blanc, and Sailor--but as all things tend to do, fountain pens sometimes leak. Everything of a mechanical nature finds a way to go non-mechanical, and so there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

Amusingly enough, as I was typing this, the service department of CompUSA called to tell me my Acer is ready, which sounded important because classes start tomorrow and it will be nice to be able to get my lecture notes down in MS Word.

Rushing to pick up the Acer, and stopping at Peet's for a latte to go, I stood behind a man who made me wish Fagan and Cook were there to see his plight. "This damned thing--" he said, waving a Mac Powerbook around. "I'm going back to PCs."

My Acer was nicely scrubbed up and pronounced fit of wind and limb, ready to go, the tech said. I was even given a new battery. When I got home, I fired up my old friend, thinking I had some time to go before considering the jump to Mac. Then I discovered that in the repair process, my hard drive had been wiped clean.

Go be fruitful and multiply yourself, I thought, thinking about the logistics of contacting Carnobite.com, who holds in their server a copy of the data on my hard drive. All was not lost,that is, not if you don't add time to the equation.

The Hard-luck Story

All stories have some kind of end-game goal, some intended effect on the hearer/reader. Is it laughter? Perhaps the author's intent is education, or irony, or reversal. Perhaps the narrative is offered in self-defense, or the adjunct of self-defense, excuse. As long as we're dwelling on the conditional perhaps, might be the intent of a story is to make the teller sound modest--moi?--or resourceful.

Surely one of the more plentiful among dramatic narratives is the hard-luck story or its close relative, the sob story. The purpose is to evoke or elicit sympathy for the teller, both in the nature of troubles piled on and in the way the load is borne by the forces of Nature and natural disaster.

You could say--and probably will, once you think about it--that The Book of Job is the classic hard-luck story, not only because of the trials visited upon Job but as well because of the capricious nature of the way the visitation was set in motion. Job happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when those polar representations of The Cosmic Forces got into a bragging and betting mood.

In more modern times, you could argue that an archetypal hard-luck story is found in a heavy contributor to Republican politics, being given a chance to go hunting with the Vice President of the United States. We all know how that turned out. That poor man will be known throughout history as the man who went bird hunting with the Veep. In Texas, where the incident took place, Republican school children will be allowed to stay home from school on the anniversary of that day, and boys with aggressive cases of facial zits will be able to say, "I went dove hunting with Dick Cheyney."


You could also, if you wanted, put the majority of Americans of voting age as players in a hard-luck story because it is our hard luck to have at the helm of the ship of state a man more like Captain Ahab than the President of the United States, although there are those who would disagree with my literary analogy, reminding me of Mary Shelley's archetypal Frankensteinas the more appropriate fit. Dr. Frankenstein represents the force behind the Vice President of the United States, a man who once was more benign than he now is, having created a monster who has attached some seven hundred fifty signing statements to bills acted into law by the Congress. Mrs. Shelley's point was a moral one, in which hubris could create a monster.

It's our hard luck story that the President of the United States, with graduate work in hubris, is in over his head and the best we can think to do in the name of conventional wisdom is to wait his term of office out.

We will nationally remain at the wrong end of a hard-luck story as long as we continue to accept our status as victim.