Analyzing a beginning

This idea was vaugely caused by my "most important part" thread. I'm sending myself on tangents...

What makes a good beginning really work? Be it a short story, or a novel, you know a good beginning when you read one, but you don't always know a bad one. this is because a bad beginning fails to engage you. Therefore, you don't think "why am I not interested?" because you're not interested. You haven't been stirred to think about it, except in extreme cases.

I am, below, going to excerpt an old Roger Zelazny story called Tower of Ice. No matter your genre, you can do worse than read Roger Zelazny.

In what way does this beginning bit work? Does it work? are you interested? Engaged? Why?

Are you NOT interested and engaged? Then tell me why not too.

The dark, horse-shaped beast paused on the icy trail. Head turned to the left and upward, it regarded the cstle atop the glistening mountain, as did its rider.

"No," the man finally stated.

The black beast continued on, ice cracking beneath its cloven metal hoofs, snow blowing about it.

"I'm beginning to suspect that there is no trail," the beast announced after a time. "We've come more than halfway around."

"I know," replied the muffled, green-booted rider. "I might be able to scale the thing, but that would mean leaving you behind."

"Risky," his mount replied. "You know my value in certain situations -- especially the ones you court."

"True. But if it should prove the only way..."

They moved on for some time, pausing periodically to study the prominence.

"Dilvish, there was a gentler part of the slope -- some distance back," the beast announced. "If I'd a good start, I could bear you up qute a distance. Not all the way to the top, but near."

"If that should prove the only way, Black, we'll go that route," the rider replied, breath steaming before him to be whipped away by the wind. "We might as well check further first, though. Hello! What is--"

A dark form came hurtling down the side of the mountain. When it seemed that it was about to strike the ice before them, it spread pale green, batlike wings and pulled itself aloft.It circled, quickly gaining altitude, then dove toward them.

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(it's a great story; good luck finding a copy anymore...)

How does it work? From first sentence to last sentence, how does it work?

rugcat said:

PeeDee, thanks! How could I ever have forgotten Dilvish The Damned?

The reason the beginning works is simple. Zelazny was a genius.

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I don't know why more people don't read Dilvish stories. I adore them, myself.

But why does the beginning work? Zelazny is a genius, damn straight, I'd give my right arm to write like he does. But I think that's why it makes a good beginning to analyze, specifically because it does work.

How I see it working:

From a purely technical standpoint, the opening of the story -- the opening of all Zelazny stories -- are deceptively simple. He starts with easy, small sentences about nothing very major. Just a horse trotting around a mountain.

But right from the second line, something occurs that makes you pay attention, that makes you engage. Who is he saying "no" to? Why did he say that? You're coming in on the middle of the conversation, yet no one is around.

Now you're paying attention, and then the horse casually answers the rider. Nothing is made of this. It's written as casually as if it's another human being. Zelazny excells at that.

From there, we begin to by degrees get into the meat of the story. This story, as a whole, is fairly simple to follow all the way through, but even his more complicated works (like Lord of Light, for example, or "The Immortal") begin simply and quietly and slowly.

In short, there is nothing to turn you off. So if you keep reading passively, he slowly brings you in, until you're interested.

...

This story, and many of his, do not start off with a "bang," as it were. No major event, no exciting twist, no hooking opening line like "He woke up dead, but that didn't explain why he was sore." It just opens, and he begins to tell you the story.

It's sort of the literary equivalent of playing hard to get. He's not inviting you in, not entirely, but if you do come in, he's making you welcome and telling you a good story. But if you were just staring at the page and not paying attention, then it would probably be of no interest to you. But the thing is, that's hard to do, because even playing hard-to-get, Zelazny is inviting. You want to know who Dilvish is talking to. You want to know why the horse talks. And then, once you like the two of them, you want to know how they'll get up the castle. And then, you want to know what this bat-like creature is that's just swooped at them.

I agree, rugcat, that you can't quantify creativity, certainly not to the extent that you could duplicate it. You can quantify why a story like this works, but it is scientifically useless, because you couldn't reproduce it. You couldnt' take what you learned from this story and apply it to a Robert Silverberg story, a Dan Brown story, etc. Some of the basics, you could, but each story is different

Nonetheless, I think analysis of creativity can be a delight and a source of enjoyment. I find it fun, when it's outside of my reading time.