The flight of a single bird in a single storm can be the single biggest thing in the world: Let's talk about a first sentence

Tuesday 6/3/25

On Friday, I began work on a story called "Honest Best," which is a classic Longer on the Inside story--that is, a story that seems to defy the laws of physics by containing more than it should possibly be able to contain given its length.

I awoke first thing on Saturday to work on it again, left it to the side on Sunday, worked on it throughout Monday, and have been working on it further here on Tuesday morning.

I was thinking it'd be instructive to look at the first sentence of the work. Thought has to go into everything you do as a writer. Every word must have a reason--and reasons--to be there, such that that word couldn't be any other word.

That takes a huge amount of care. But I can take you through every word I write in my fiction, and tell you the reasons why I used that word. If I sat down with someone over something I wrote six years ago, I'd be able to explain why I made every choice I did the same as I could have at the time, as if I'd just made those choices again.

This is the first sentence of this new story:

The sound from the girl’s own feet stamping made her think of a soldier marching off to war.

That was a lot of work, because there's a lot happening there. All of these levels of meanings that the language takes us to, without having to use up additional words to express that meaning.

When we do this, we're also reaching reader in different parts of their brain. Parts that aren't just the conscious part. And that's exceedingly important. You need to get to those parts.

So what do we have here? No commas, subject-verb sentence. You want to start fast. Every work of fiction should start fast. Writers, though, often erroneously think that means start with action--a gunshot, an explosion, whatever.

But action is character. And you can start fast, and with action, via emotion, urgency, stakes. There's mental action, emotional action, spiritual action.

Don't get caught up in this idea that action is a chase sequence. Even in the best action films, the best action is at the level of the character. Think of Star Wars, which people view as action writ-large. But what are the most treasured parts? May the Force be with you, I am your father, the Yoda-Luke back and forth, I love you-I know.

Let's start by looking at the third word of the sentence: The preposition "from."

I didn't want to repeat the preposition "of," that we get later in the sentence. If a word repeats, any word, there should be a reason for it. The writer shouldn't be unaware that the word repeated.

You need to spot all of the repetitions and make sure they're deliberate. Otherwise, it's a mistake. Come up with a different word. Depending on what the word is. I'm working here with an eighteen word-sentence. "The" can repeat, but that's all I want to have repeat.

I'm not just choosing the "from" to negate repetition, though. The narration is third person. But third person is working with the character. The sound "from" means that that character is hearing that sound as if she also stands apart from it. Like we, the readers, do. Only, not as far apart from it as we are.

This indicates her awareness. That she's not just caught up in her self, oblivious to whatever is coming from her because it's her.

We are three words in and we're learning about this character and their mindset. Then there is that "own." "...from her own feet" is different than "...from her feet."

I don't want to make it seem that that this girl may be listening to another girl. It's my intent not to take the reader out of the story in order to have to consider this possibility. I want their full immersion. No need whatsoever for them to check, if you will, their own reading. Like they're editing their reading.

If the sentence is

The sound of the girl’s stamping feet made her think of a soldier marching off to war.

there's a different meaning. Markedly different.

The girl and the "her" in the alternate sentence aren't necessarily the same person. There's the greater chance that they're not. One could be a child and the other an adult. In either scenario, we have this idea of observation. Observing someone else is a completely different proposition than being aware of your own actions and noting them. The subject of the observation changes.

The way that the sentence is written in the story, it's like the girl, having caught herself in this moment, is also listening in on and observing herself. She continues, though, doing what she's doing, which is pouting, but it's also somewhat performative pouting, as if she's going through old motions, and knows better to some degree, or a now-dawning degree, a truth born out by the language. The linguistic presentation. The framing and the underwriting.

That "from" is hers more than it is ours, as well as the "own"; it's how something is registering in her mind. When you use "own" like that, you're separating, whether you know it or not. You're contrasting. You're drawing a distinction.

It's kind of like saying, "Speaking for myself..."

You see how that implies that there's something else and the POV is relational? There have to be two vantage points--or subjects, objects--at play. Or more. But it can't just be one. We're situated in her mental schema. A majority of the point of view of hers. Whatever that percentage is. Sixty-five percent. The preposition and the possessive belong less to us and more to her. They're her bailiwick.

Typically we'd think that we're the reader, the words belong first and foremost to us in terms of the actual experience of doing this reading. We're why they're on this page in the first place. True. But just because narratively a word or phrase may belong more to a character, that doesn't mean it belongs less to us in the readerly sense. Do you see the difference?

The "own" is suggestive of a colloquialism when we look at it divorced from the context. As in, "I tripped over my own two feet."

But it's like a refinanced colloquialism, with a different valuation. The "own" makes it clear that this is one person--and not a person observing a second person--and thus becomes a grammatical requirement, or a requirement for clarity, rather than a stylistic choice, a flown-in device or trope. The colloquial association is negated. Doesn't even get to exist. It's almost like pre-negation. Because you wouldn't read it that way. A situation was created where there was no other way to do this thing. When you do that, it becomes self-contained.

She's conscious of what she's doing. And she's also positioned at such a vantage point that she's able to note this sound she's making and, further, likens it to a soldier marching off to war.

There we are, and we're us. Us, us, us. But sometimes, we're both us and them. We have two seats at the performance. Up on the stage, and out on the aisle.

In her mind, she's mounting a battle. You see the association? That's how you'd think. You imagine yourself as the hero in the drama, or someone digging in, so to speak. The metaphor isn't mine--or the narrator's--so much as it's hers.

But we, the readers, have a greater scope of associative meaning with that concluding metaphor of hers. Territorially-speaking, not all words and phrases and metaphors and similes are shared equally. We think--as adults--of marching off to war as possibly never coming back, and certainly not coming back for a long time. It's not a case of, "Okay, here I go, see you next month maybe."

Growing up can be similar. You're off. You're not coming back. I don't mean to the house in which you grew up, but childhood itself. That childhood can be lost--a form of death--or become something that's little returned to, as in, "going to be a while" with the war metaphor.

It's her metaphor, but we have greater dibs on it, so to speak, as far as that valuation of meaning goes. She reaches for, but we already hold.

It's kind of like with third person, this idea of different words and phrases belonging more to a character than to us, or to us than a character. With the "from" aspect of the sentence, that third person is shaded towards first person.

Third person is always in flux and evolving throughout a story if it's done well. The paradox is that it evolves both forwards and backwards. That is, its evolution isn't a linear progression. Think of it like some assessor. Third person assesses what's best for the imparting of the meaning of the story. It's a facilitator. Third person can be third person in name only. Third person can be more first person in a sense than third person while still being third person. It can be fifty-five percent third person and forty-five percent something else. Or multiple something elses.

There's so much math involved in great writing, and writers usually have no clue about this.

We have scope and stakes from the outset with this story. The very first line and throughout the parts--as a progression--of that first line. This might as well be her Waterloo. On that day of her life. The flight of a single bird in a single storm can be the single biggest thing in the world because for that bird in the moment it is. Leave everything else out of it. Nothing else need exist.

And if you capture this and what it means--where that bird is coming from, what that flight entails, and where the bird is trying to get--you will also touch on everything else that there is, in some way. If you do it completely. And you leave no meaning behind and instead get it all out.

She's in two worlds at once. Or more. Her old world, her potentially new world. A theoretical world, a world she's trying out, an imaginative world, a girlish world and a bigger girlish world. She's being dramatic and also becoming cognizant. The drama is perhaps passing. She's realizing that this kind of drama is done with or ought to be. It almost bores her, such that she's taken out of her own immediate moment and is imagining what she's seen in cartoons or movies, because she probably doesn't know very much about soldiers. Part of that is because she's a girl. That's just a thing. That's life. The girl is less apt to have the army figures or played with them at grandma's house.

She also upgraded herself, if you will. Marching is more honorable than stamping. But we could also say that she's shown humility, because she isn't just giving herself a pass, and this is the first portion of addressing what you're doing; that is, stepping outside of yourself as if you were someone else observing yourself.

We all know these eighteen words of that first sentence, but no one else is going to write this sentence, which also serves as the whole of the first paragraph. The second sentence--which itself is the whole of the second paragraph--expands into a four-clause sentence, those four clauses mirroring a sort of hut-two-three-four construction, where we get proof of a new understanding. Her understanding. The proof is up on shaky legs, but legs all the same. It's two sentences, and you're believably meeting a character, getting to know her, and seeing her change. This isn't MFA writing. None of this happens there. Those people have never, and would never, think this way. It wouldn't ever occur to them if they were capable of it, and they're not, let alone putting it into practice.

Someone wanting to be contrarian could say, "TLDR! No one cares!" and "No one would ever notice any of that."

First of all--care about things. It's good for you. You're only hurting yourself when you don't, and all the more so when you don't care about things of consequence. Secondly, yes, of course no one isn't going to consciously notice any of this. Well, I would. But that's neither here nor there. This is part of the reason why when you see my work next to the work of these people in publishing who are awful at writing that my work hits like it does. Why it "flows" like it does. Why it makes all of this sense like it does. Why someone says, "I know exactly what that means" and empathizes or relates it to their life. It's brand new, and unlike anything they've ever seen/read, but it also feels like a coming home.

You don't want people, really, to even notice these things. But it's part of the reason why it hits deeper. They're not consciously thinking about the valuation of prepositions and all of that, but they're getting stuff and it doesn't feel like work reading it. It's not some horrible, boring chore. Allowing that they see it and know about it. Having people see it and know about is a far bigger problem--that I haven't solved--than needing to have the best art ever made. That's not a problem. That's the easy part.

But it assures and means nothing, especially in what our world has become. That doesn't bring people to it. People have to be brought other ways, for other reasons. They could even have it on authority from God or whatever they believe in that such and such is the best thing there has been. They still won't take so much as a look. They have to be made to look. Then who knows. Hasn't happened yet.

All of this is meticulous choice done for myriad reasons. Everything you write has to be done in this manner. No word can just be there. It has to have utmost, absolute, maximum purpose. You need to get to the conscious and the subconscious. You have to reach all of these different levels and there must be meaning on all of these different levels.

This particular story is 500 words long. "That's it." But there's really no "that's it" about it. And it doesn't read like 500 words or 50,000 words. It's completely its own thing that stands outside of time and strictures and conceptions of length.

But this is how great art is supposed to function. Which also renders the whole short attention span thing moot. Because we're off the clock anyway.