The Great White Intro

Bear with me while I try and explain my syndrome...

I am currently doing my honors year at university after a five year hiatus (where I mostly wrote bad poetry and drank red wine) and my fellow students appear to be made up of Gen Y kids who think Starbuck is a coffee chain and whales are there to make the cheerleader from Heroes look thinner. Needless to say I'm sure they think I'm the weird fish girl writing about Moby Dick.

Eh, that's true enough. But I have bigger fish to fry.

Those fish come in the form of a 7000 word story due for submission in September. But once again, like a rash on a clap victim, my syndrome has raised its ugly head.

The Call Me Ishmael Syndrome has plagued me since my youth.

Most nights I would curl up with a good book and read for hours under the covers with a flashlight. Authors like Dickens, and Melville, and the Bronte sisters (alongside my much loved Nancy Drew and Susan Sand novels) would nightly speak to me in voices that were wise and elegant, visceral but also restrained. And while these stories, whether it be Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations, were page after page of glorious reading I was only really interested in one thing… the first line.

Once I realised that my youthful love of reading was morphing into a skill with pen and paper (or word processor) I was, at first, delighted by the idea of writing my own perfect first line.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

“It was love at first sight.”

I mean come on, how can I compete with that!

In fact these days the idea of having to write a first line, let alone a first paragraph haunts me; it stalks me through my subconscious with the gusto and gnashing teeth of a deep sea leviathan.

Well, no more… I take up the proverbial harpoon, sharpen the head, roll back my shoulder and take aim.


Thar she blows, my quest for the great white intro…