Books need to have an exciting beginning, one that grips the reader. Something that makes them unable to put it down, or even think about not continuing.
And yet Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, which purports to “deep dive into the very nature of consciousness,” begins with a man alone in an elevator.
During the last stream, we took a look at the opening few chapters to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and examined it sentence by sentence.
I love the opening to this book because it is the complete opposite of what we usually think the beginning of a book should be like. There’s no action, no movement, we don’t even learn the main character’s name. Instead, we’re given a glimpse directly into the character’s mind.
By spending nearly six whole pages simply describing an elevator, both physically and emotionally, in unique and poignant ways, the author draws us into the story far more powerfully than any explosion ever could. The protagonist’s mind-tangents about Houdini and what-if-the-Earth-was-a-coffee-table are just weird enough to be interesting but not mind-boggling, and they’re spread out enough to be welcome and not annoying.
Here’s a sample of the annotating that we did.
This beginning perfectly sets up the weirdness to follow.
There’s a ton of great stuff going on in this first chapter, more than I can get into in a short post. If you’re interested in leveling up your own writing, then be sure to watch the full video below.
After that the chat voted that we write this prompt created by Kaleon: The world’s worst bodyguard tries to fend off the world’s worst assassin.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.
Featured image: Amazon