Tiptree's beginnings always pack a punch, signaling the conflict of the story without being overly overt about the strategy.In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.
I see her first while the Mexicana 747 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.
The title plays off nearly every line: “I see her first,” (who? is it one of the women from the title?) “a double female blur,” “the near blur,” “the younger blur, “registering nothing,” finishing up with “I never would have looked at them or thought of them again,” at which point the reader is screaming why? why don’t you see them? The answer to that question is crucial to the story.
Here’s another Tiptree beginning, this time of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which uses the strategy of referring to a memory to reveal the conflict. The memory is connected to gender and embarrassment, which will also turn out to be crucial to the story.
Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly — or was he pushed? –into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is Tiptree at her best, examining gender norms and conventions with a ruthless, scathingly honest eye. Somehow that first moment of embarrassment, that moment of being in “the strange toilet” encapsulates so much of what that story is about and how alien the sexes can be to each other as well as how strange their container, the norms that make them up, which constitute the walls of “the can” itself, are. Look at how the center of his masculinity is framed visually: the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. There is so much going on in that first paragraph, including sensory details like the twitch of his insides, the blare of a giggle, the pattern and threat of a zipper, that it’s worth copying out, pulling apart sentence by sentence to figure out how it’s working.
Let’s finish up with Tiptree in a moment that puts everything up front, in the short story “We Who Stole the Dream”:
The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.
Woah. We don’t know what’s going on precisely, but we know crucial details. We have a deadline and it is only twelve minims. While we don’t know how long a minim is, we know it’s not much time because of that “only”. Plus, there’s an auditory echo of “minute” that makes us think they’re of similar length.
What’s at stake? This lives of children, for pete’s sake. Not just child, but children, multiple. And we know how they’ll die: suffocation. It would be hard to write a tauter, more dire beginning.
Writing exercise: write three first lines. They can state the stakes, as in the third example, or refer to some memory or object that encapsulates the conflict, as with the example from “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Include two titles for each, one that plays off the beginning and one that does not.
For bonus points, read “The Women Men Don’t See” and use that as your inspiration.
Feel free to post some of your best first lines on here, I’d love to see some!
First opening line: “When you’re the kind to get depressed, boredom’s about as dangerous as a gun to the head.”
Didn’t spark anything after the first paragraph; moved on. No titles.
Second opening line: It started out as “Someone had given me an apron, a grown-up’s apron, when I was just a kid.” The story that developed grabbed me so much that I finished it, but I had to change the opening line: “I knew what the package for my daughter was before I even opened the box: my grandmother’s apron.”
The two titles on the second story:
–Doesn’t play: Inheritance
–Does play: Inappropriate Gifts
Thank you! This was quite inspirational. I only wrote one first line, because I just kept going. So here is my first line, and then what came next:
At the sound of footsteps on the dock overhead, Lime took a silent breath and let her head slip beneath the filthy waves. In blackness, she climbed down the pylon toward safety, her fingers gripping clumps of mussels like the rungs of a ladder. She couldn’t afford to swim down, to risk stirring the surface where she’d been.
I love that as a beginning, it’s got tension, it lets us know something’s at stake, and gripping the clumps of mussel is a great tactile moment. Write the rest of the story!
Like San (please imagine the umlaut) my first one turned into a paragraph. Which turned into a kick-start for a WIP that’s been driving me bats:
On her ten-thousandth trip between the van and the new house, Dantang realized she was now wearing the path deeper all by herself. And wearing out her left shoulder. In the shade of the monster chestnut tree, the one embracing the entire roof, she let the box slip from its perch into her hands and then thump down, puffing dust across her toes. The talcum path delighted bare feet, but its dust desiccated eyes and tongues. Dantang worked her shoulder, wincing. Mustn’t switch arms, oh no. Let her just think about hoisting somebody’s cinderblock collection using her sword arm, and Mom and Dad would reappear like magic, never mind she’d heard that lecture already.
Have no clue if that HTML will work. Oh, titles? I hate them. I have two approaches, ask somebody else and start with the title. The title that doesn’t play: “Undercover.” It’ll do for a working title.
Late to the party, but I’ve been referring back to this, so here’s mine:
The crows warned her. Whenever someone came down the road they’d start a racket in the trees, cawing high intrigue, like every village gossip on every market corner given rough voice and imperative tone and stuffed into the branches to declaim. The sound startled the rest of the birds from their perches, sending them up in a gust of shadow and form. Mostly, the racket was nothing to worry about ““ a delivery from Iden, or wagons pacing by on their way north toward the Capital ““ but today, as Cael rinsed her hands under the cold pump faucet, she heard a thunder of hooves.
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Hopepunk Thoughts Plus A Reading List
As mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (hello new readers coming from there!) last year, I came up with a new class, “Punk U: The Whys and Wherefores of Writing -punk Fiction“, which attempted to explore some of the -punk subgenres, starting with cyberpunk and progressing through steampunk, dieselpunk, nanopunk, solarpunk, afropunk, monkpunk, mannerpunk, and a dozen others. Of all of them, the most fascinating to me — and the one that’s had the greatest influence on my recent fiction, is hopepunk.
What is hopepunk? The term was first coined by Alexandra Rowland as the antithesis of “grimdark,” a speculative genre featuring fatalistic nihilism and a tooth vs. claw environment. She wrote:
“The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “˜The glass is half empty. “˜Hopepunk says, “˜No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half full.’ Yeah, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and kind. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”
Just the amount that I have seen people get more politically active in the last year has been amazing. I want to point out that kindness doesn’t necessarily mean softness. Kindness can mean standing up for someone who’s being bullied. If someone has a gun to your friend’s head, punching the guy with the gun is an act of kindness because you’re saving someone through that. So kindness is not always soft.
Kindness is not necessarily passive. Kindness is something that you can go out and fight for. Going to a protest, if you frame it in a particular way, is an act of kindness because you’re doing something for the future. You’re contributing to the future. You’re putting more good in the world is I think how I would define doing kindness. If you see someone being shouted at by a bigot on the subway, just standing up for them and having their back is an act of kindness.
And being kind also is something that requires so much bravery sometimes.
Others seized on the term with joyous abandon — and one of the signatures of hopepunk is, in my opinion, a sense that the writer is creating happily and full throttle. I’d call a number of the works on this year’s Nebula Award ballot hopepunk, particularly Trail of Lightning and The Calculating Stars, and I suspect there will be plenty of it on the Hugo and World Fantasy ballots this year as well.
Hopepunk is a reaction to our times, an insistence that a hollow world built of hatred and financial ambition is NOT the norm. It is stories of resistance, stories that celebrate friendship and truth and the things that make us human. In today’s world, being kind is one of the most radical things you can do, and you can see society trying to quash it by prosecuting those who offer food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and shelter to those in need.
Claudie Arseneault spoke why she wanted hopepunk in her essay, Constructing a Kinder Future, for Strange Horizons:
The truth is, I’ve had enough of stories where your best friend or your closest family members are your most bitter enemies, where anyone you’re not in love with is an opponent to defeat, a potential traitor. Enough of stories where heroes must use each other as mere pawns, nothing more than pieces in a game, and abandon the “weak,” the naïve, the nice ones. Cruel ruthlessness is not our strength. It will not save us, and it should not be hailed as an acceptable means to an end, no matter the end. Our strength is in collaboration, in communities who link arms in the face of dangers, in perfect strangers donating to other people’s crowdfunding campaigns, and I want fiction to reflect that. I want characters who value their friends, who see perfect strangers as full-fledged human beings worthy of their help, and who fight the world with hope and kindness to be rewarded for it.
Is this desire for hope something new? No, it’s something that we’ve always celebrated in stories. Think about the moment in the Lord of the Rings when acts of kindness — first on Bilbo’s part, then on Frodo’s — lead to the moment where Gollum enables the ring’s destruction when Frodo falters and is on the brink of giving up his quest. Or go even further back, to Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, who are rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers who turn out to be gods.
But in recent decades we’ve let other, darkerstories, mocking the earnest and shredding empathy, supplant those fables. Stories written by the kleptocracy, designed to make its victims despair and give way to apathetic acceptance, stories spat out daily by the messageboard shitlords trying to convince us that meme-based mockery should be the first reaction to any appeal to the human heart. They’re there to enforce the rule that to step away from the line– to be joyous or non-conforming or outside the system in any way — is to be aberrant and wrong.
One of the things resisting that is hopepunk. The movement has caught on, with some perceiving it as vital to sowing the seeds of resistance, as with Vox describing it as “weaponized optimism”, adding “Hopepunk combines the aesthetics of choosing gentleness with the messy politics of revolution.” In an article for America, Jim McDermott went so far as to call it “quintessentially Catholic“, saying:
Death on the cross, understood not as some brutal cosmic math equation but a personal choice to continue to love and give and believe even when your life is at stake, is the beating heart of Catholic hopepunk. So is Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God as a banquet where all are welcome and called to kindness, and the lives of holy people like Martin Luther King, Jr., St. Francis of Assisi or Mary MacKillop, R.S.J., who refused to accept the premises of the reality in which they lived and experienced their own deaths and resurrections as a result. It’s Greg Boyle, S.J., insisting “There is no “˜them’ and “˜us,’ there is only us,” young people from all over the world traveling to Panama to create and imagine the church or Mary Oliver inviting us over and over in her poetry to consider “our one wild and precious life.”
Hopepunk is a movement that understands the importance of stories and how they can affect change, and so hopepunk often — perhaps even usually — has casts that are as diverse as the world around us, featuring characters of color, transexuals, a-romantics, differently-abled, and more, building empathy by showing that there are certain basic things any of us want, regardless of which other or others we do or don’t belong to.
In thinking about it, I find that hopepunk has crept into my life over the past few years. The Feminist Futures Storybundle I just curated holds more than one example, as did last year’s version of it. The anthology I edited last year, which appeared at the beginning of this month, If This Goes On, is full of examples of it.
One of the charms of the hopepunk definition is that it’s somewhat expandable — happy + hopeful, plus an insistence that it’s not a totally hostile universe, seems to be the base definition. In fact, it doesn’t have to be speculative fiction. Here’s Bryn Hammond talking about examples of it in historical fiction.
One of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., often preached kindness in his work. He also said, “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you become it.” Try being kind, being mindful of your impact on the world and lives around you, and you may be surprised at exactly how kind you can be.
Recently hopepunk has elbowed its way into my writing as well, insisting on the importance of kindness and community. I just finished up a story where that instinct plays an important part, and I know that the next story I’m turning to, about animatronic Beatles in a post-apocalyptic landscape, will have many of the same resonances. Is this a deliberate focus or accidental? I’m not sure, but I feel hopeful about it.
9 Responses
An interesting experiment.
First opening line: “When you’re the kind to get depressed, boredom’s about as dangerous as a gun to the head.”
Didn’t spark anything after the first paragraph; moved on. No titles.
Second opening line: It started out as “Someone had given me an apron, a grown-up’s apron, when I was just a kid.” The story that developed grabbed me so much that I finished it, but I had to change the opening line: “I knew what the package for my daughter was before I even opened the box: my grandmother’s apron.”
The two titles on the second story:
–Doesn’t play: Inheritance
–Does play: Inappropriate Gifts
I went with the second.
I didn’t get to the third opening line 🙂
I think the apron’s a really evocative and interesting gift. Are you writing that story?
Thank you! This was quite inspirational. I only wrote one first line, because I just kept going. So here is my first line, and then what came next:
I love that as a beginning, it’s got tension, it lets us know something’s at stake, and gripping the clumps of mussel is a great tactile moment. Write the rest of the story!
Like San (please imagine the umlaut) my first one turned into a paragraph. Which turned into a kick-start for a WIP that’s been driving me bats:
Have no clue if that HTML will work. Oh, titles? I hate them. I have two approaches, ask somebody else and start with the title. The title that doesn’t play: “Undercover.” It’ll do for a working title.
Anyway, thanx, Cat!
I love how deeply inside the character’s head that is. Lots of great sensory stuff and a real sense of impending conflict.
Late to the party, but I’ve been referring back to this, so here’s mine:
I love that, but you also had me at “crows.” Are you writing the rest of the story?