Fiction writers are weird. You needn’t read novels to figure that out. Just sneak into an author’s house and listen in. Or, if you’re not comfortable with breaking and entering, hire a private investigator to bug the place. Yes, I realize reading a book might seem easier than all that, but who has time to read these days? Besides, you could use a little more excitement in your life.
Following are just a few of the things you’re likely to overhear in a fiction writer’s home that you aren’t likely to hear anywhere else – on this or any other planet.
1) “Coming to bed in a moment, dear. First I have to hide a body.”
2) “I have some horrible news. It’s my protagonist – he’s refusing to talk to me.”
3) “I got paid today – let’s go split a beer!
4) “Fine, I’ll Google it. I just thought you might know what gets blood and brains out of cashmere.”
5) “How can all of you just sit there so calmly and watch TV when I just told you I’m having trouble with chapter seven!”
6) “Go ahead and eat without me. I need another hour to figure out the best poisoning method.”
7) “A reader just informed me of a typo on page 147 of my new novel. I’m going out for razorblades. Don’t wait up.”
8) “You invited THEM over for dinner? They haven’t even bought my book yet.”
9) “I am NOT growing more distant. I just find you harder to talk to than my characters.”
10) “When I find out who gave me that two-star review on Amazon, I’m putting them in my next novel.”
11) “Can’t you get your mother to rush you to the hospital? I’m really in the groove right now.”
12) “Honey, have you seen my pajamas? You know I can’t go to work tomorrow without them.”
13) “Sorry for giggling. It’s just one of my main characters said the funniest thing today.”
14) “What do you MEAN we won an all expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii? Damn it! I’ll NEVER finish this book!"
15) "A divorce? Fine. But you get the kids; I get the printer and all the ink cartridges."
If you are a writer, what kinds of crazy sh*t might be overheard in your home? If you LIVE with a writer, contact my wife to commiserate.
War. Terrorism. Mass shootings. Economic collapse. Natural disasters. Political idiocy. Pokémon Go.
Welcome to hell on earth.
The good news is, things are terrible everywhere, thus we humans can enjoy a sense of global unity. The bad news is, that sense of unity is growing stronger everyday.
In other words, shit’s getting ridiculous. That said, we have to try to make the most of the world crumbling. Personally, I use it to punish my teenage daughter. Whenever she misbehaves or blows off her homework, I no longer ground her; I just make her listen to the news.
Another thing I do to make the most of a crumbling world is write.
And so should you.
Writing – particularly writing fiction – is one of the best ways to raise a middle finger to reality, to rail against the chaos, to control the uncontrollable. To flip the script. To remain sane inside the loony bin.
Not happy about all the horrible things happening in the world around you? Create your OWN world. Use your imagination to rip a hole through apathy, angst and hopelessness. Or, if you aren’t up for creating new worlds, then just write about how you feel about planet Earth going to hell in a hand-basket. This can be very freeing.
“But Greg, I’m not a very good writer.”
That doesn’t matter! Most writers aren’t very good writers. Just write. You needn’t pen (or type) perfect prose or poetry. Simply take what’s burning you up inside, what’s tearing you limb from limb, and kick its ass with whatever words come to you. Forget about who might read it; in fact, don’t even worry about showing it to another living soul. After all, I’m not talking about you trying to land a multi-book deal with Harper Collins or Penguin Random House. (If you DO land such a deal, please put in a good word for me.) I’m simply talking about expressing yourself via the very liberating and powerful written word. Hell, you can even use emojis if you must. No judgment.
There are a lot of terrifying things to be frightened of. Writing should NOT be one of them. We cannot let all of the daily horrors destroy our spirit or send us into panic mode.
There’s no need to run for your life. WRITE for it instead.
Want to see how I use fiction to channel my fury and stay out of prison? Check out my latest novel, Sick to Death.
I recently interviewed Gage Adder – the main character from my new novel, Sick to Death. Some of you may think interviewing a fictional person is crazy. It’s not. What’s crazy is writing an entire book about one. But since it’s too late for me to do anything about the latter, I figured I might as well proceed with the former.
For those of you unfamiliar with Gage (and based on book sales, that’s most of you), let me get you up to speed by sharing the blurb from the back cover of the novel he stars in:
Knowing you're dying can be murder.
When Gage Adder finds out he has inoperable pancreatic cancer, things really start to look up for him. He leaves his soul-crushing job, joins a nice terminal illness support group, and takes up an exciting new hobby: Beating the hell out of bad guys.
Gage’s support group friends Jenna and Ellison don’t approve of his vigilante activities. Jenna says fighting never solves anything. Poison, on the other hand… When the three decide to team up and hit the streets, suddenly no rapist, pedophile or other odious criminal in the city is safe.
They are the sickest of superheroes. Their superpower is nothing left to lose. But what happens when one of them takes this power too far and puts at risk the lives of hundreds of innocent people? Where does one draw the line when dying to kill?
Now don’t go judging a guy by his back cover. Gage may be a serial killer, but his heart is in the right place.
Here’s the transcript from my interview with him so you can see for yourself:
Me: Hello, Gage… may I call you Gage?
Gage: Seeing as how you did throughout the entire novel, it would be strange if you didn’t now.
Me: Right. Sorry. It’s just I didn’t want to risk being too casual and rub you the wrong way. I’ve seen what you do to people who rub you the wrong way.
Gage: Relax. You’re okay in my book. Mainly because I’m okay in yours. Besides, it’s not like I’m some psychopath who goes after everyone I dislike. You have to have done some really bad things to end up on my list.
Me: Well, I mean, I did sort of give you advanced pancreatic cancer.
Gage: That’s true, but I can let that slide.
Me: I appreciate that. But why?
Gage: In giving me a fatal disease, you gave me something to live for.
Me: Care to elaborate?
Gage: Sure. Before I got sick, I was complacent, apathetic, stuck in a rut. I felt trapped in a job I despised, but I kept at it because the job paid too well to leave. Then came my fatal diagnosis, and I was free. Having forty or fifty years removed from your timeline can really open you up to new and exciting opportunities. Imminent death is very liberating.
Me: For many in your situation, “new and exciting opportunities” would mean using what limited time you had left to travel the world, experience new cultures, that sort of thing. You went a rather different route, though.
Gage: Yeah. I’m as surprised as anyone about the path I ended up taking. If you had told me two years ago that I’d get diagnosed with terminal cancer and become a vigilante serial killer, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
Me: Crazy how things turn out sometimes. Especially when you’re fictional.
Gage: Who are you calling fictional?
Me: Well, um, you do know you are a, uh…
Gage: I am a what?
Me: Never mind. My mistake. Let’s move on.
Gage: Good idea.
Me: So tell us, how does it feel to, you know, kill someone?
Gage: I have to be careful how I answer that. I don’t want anyone to read this and think it’s okay to commit murder whenever they feel like it.
Me: Don’t worry, nobody reads my blog. Please, proceed.
Gage: I also want to point out that I show a lot of altruism in the book. For every miscreant I dispose of, I carry out several random acts of kindness for good people down on their luck.
Me: Yeah, yeah, you’re a regular Albert Schweitzer. Now kindly answer the question.
Gage: All I can say is killing someone who truly deserves it, well, it feels… right. It feels like you’re doing your community and your city and the world a service.
Me: You’re leaving a lot open to interpretation. Who “truly deserves” to be killed?
Gage: Jeez, I thought you’d give me at least a few “softball” questions. You really know how to put a guy at ease.
Me: I’m simply asking what’s probably on most people’s minds. You can’t make it your life’s calling to kill people when you’re dying and expect everyone to just accept it.
Gage: Okay, well, rather than me making a list of the types of people I feel have no business walking this planet, I’ll just invite everyone to read Sick to Death and make up their own minds. I’ll bet the vast majority of readers end up rooting for my colleagues and me upon seeing whom we go after – and when they discover why I couldn’t really stop even if I wanted to.
Me: Now it just sounds like you’re trying to sell books.
Gage: I thought that was the whole point of this interview?
Me: Excuse me, Gage, but I am an artist – not a salesman. If my intention was merely to sell books, I wouldn’t have taken the time to conduct this interview. I would have simply pointed out that Sick to Death is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle form, and that Craig Clevenger – the fantastic author of The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria – says, “Sick to Death is a tour de force dark comedy.”
I never judge a book by its cover. I judge it by its first line, or lines. If I’m not blown away or at least utterly intrigued by the end of the opening paragraph, I’m gone.
Call it impatience. Call it ADD. I’m sorry, but life’s too short and my reading list too long for me to spend more than half a minute on a tale that doesn’t grab me by the goodies from the get-go.
I know, I know, there’s such a thing as foreplay. Just not in fiction. Not for me. Not when it comes to Chapter One, anyway.
I get that I’m probably missing out on some worthwhile reads due to my demands for immediate literary gratification. That’s fine by me. I have to draw the line somewhere to ensure I have time to write, time for friends and family, and time to binge-watch Breaking Bad over and over.
So what does it take for me to move past page one of a book? I’ll show you. Following are what I consider to be 25 of the best opening lines in literature, in no particular order:
1) “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” –1984 by George Orwell
2) “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” –The Stranger by Albert Camus
3) “It was a pleasure to burn.” –Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4) “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” –Murphy by Samuel Beckett
5) “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” –One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez,
6) “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” –Neuromancer by William Gibson
7) “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” –The Crow Road by Iain M. Banks
8) “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” –The Luck of the Bodkins by PG Wodehouse
9) “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” –The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
10) “Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” –Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
11) “I am living at the Villa Gorghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.” –Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
12) “A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.” –Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
13) “I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn…” –The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
14) “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
15) “I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.” –The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
16) “I am a sick man… I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.” –Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
17) “He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.” –Orlando by Virginia Woolf
18) “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” –Beloved by Toni Morrison
19) “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” –Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
20) “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” –Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
21) “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” –Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
22) “Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead.” –Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
23) “On a very cold and lonely Friday last November, my father disappeared from the Dictionary.” –The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
24) “None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore.” –True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne
25) “Once upon a time, in a far off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.” –An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
26 – Bonus!) “Everyone in the subway car gasped when the man with the shaved head slid off his seat and crumpled to the floor. Everyone except Gage.” –Sick to Death by… ME! (Okay, so maybe it isn’t one of the best opening lines in literature, but it’s most definitely one of the best opening lines in literature I’VE written. The book just launched earlier this month – I hope you’ll have a look!)
What are some of YOUR favorite opening lines in literature? Please share them in the comments section below.
It is with great pride and enthusiasm – coupled with just the right amount of crippling fear and self-doubt – that I announce the launch of my new novel, Sick to Death. (Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle form.)
Sick to Death is being hailed by critics everywhere as the greatest novel ever written about a group of terminally ill individuals who become vigilante serial killers.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to sit here and write some long blog post about how awesome the book is.
If you need a little more convincing before making your purchase, I understand. That’s why I added a whole Sick to Death page to my website where you can read the book’s blurb, an excerpt from Chapter 1, as well as some early reader testimonials. And then there’s what I consider the coolest feature of the page: The bright red “BUY IT” icon. You should really give that icon a try.
To all of you who end up succumbing to the pressure, THANK YOU – I hope you thoroughly enjoy the book. To the rest of you, THANK YOU – I hope my unconditional gratitude will compel you to buy the book.
"Sick to Death is a tour de force dark comedy."
-Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist's Handbook and Dermaphoria
