Great Stories Have Great Beginnings

One of the main reasons, I think, Benjamin Alire Sáenz received the coveted Pen/Faulkner Award for this collection of stories, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, is his talent for amazing story beginnings that invoke conflict and tension through poetic imagery that entices a reader’s interest. The further a reader journeys with each story, the more they can see his vision of place, focusing on the geographical center of the collection—The Kentucky Club, a dive bar located in Juaréz, Mexico.

In his story, “He Has Gone To Be With The Women,” Sáenz first sentence, “The slant of morning light made him look like he was about to catch on fire” (Sáenz 11), is a poetic introduction to the narrator’s psyche. Sáenz’ choice to use morning light depicts the dawn of a relationship, and fire has a multitude of connotations, such as being uncontrollable, igniting others, and consuming itself. The narrator shares a deep emotional response to the reader. The statement about this person becomes enticing, as well as shocking, and makes the reader want to know more.

The second paragraph continues the narrator’s emotionally detailed description to spark more interest:

Every Sunday he was there, a singular, solitary figure—but not sad and not lonely. And not tragic. He became the main character of a story I was writing in my head. Some people are so beautiful that they belong everywhere they go. That was the first sentence. (Sáenz 11)

Now, we are in a story about a story of a man who ignites the heart of the narrator. For me, I’m compelled to read more, and quickly, because I want to find out why.

“The Art of Translation” is the second story of the collection. It’s about the victim of racial violence. The tension of this story is about the aftermath of a hate crime on the individual, no longer able to discern their own identity, because they have been marked as a representative of their race and stripped of their individuality. Historically, some of the most horrendous crimes have been committed through racial divides, and wars are continuously fought because of race. This is a mentally stimulating device for any reader is a sense of tension between characters. Construction of tension can be difficult because it can come off as contrive, either due to the situation or forgetting adequate descriptors.

“The Art of Translation” begins after the violent act has occurred, and the victim is in his hospital bed, recovering from his wounds: “There were moments when I sensed my mother and father at my side, staring at me as if they were trying to sift through the wreckage of a storm, trying to find my remains (Sáenz 45). The imagery depicts the narrator’s conflict with the natural world, where he encounters forces beyond his control, leaving only the wreckage behind in the aftermath of a storm. Now, I want to know what happened? Every reader should want to read further and answer this question because it’s so damn intriguing.

Still in the first paragraph, the narrator continues to describe his mother’s touch, “My mother would touch me, hold my hand, whisper words to me, words I couldn’t understand. I felt as if I was no longer in control of my own voice, my own body (Sáenz 45). Her care, even her face is no longer recognizable, because he cannot feel, she cannot comfort him. And, at the end of the short paragraph, the reader learns of another source of pain, “I could see the hurt in her eyes as she whispered my name and I felt as if I had become a wound, the source of all her hurt (Sáenz 45)”.

A brilliant opening such as this makes the reader want to read further into the story and find answers to these questions. Something or someone has taken away the narrator’s identity, and we see it through his loss of control. Not just how it happened, but why did it happen? Will he regain his power? Questions about the main character build with every beautiful line.

Sáenz creates a strong emotive pathway into the reader through his narrator in his third story, “The Rule Maker”. The story begins as a list of early memories of childhood about school, a teacher, and the playground. It takes place in Juárez, Mexico. The school and teacher’s name are Hispanic. Each detail is unique for this narrator and builds a very concrete world for us to enter. Memory invokes powerful emotions, and, combining details involving our senses, we become emotionally invested as readers.

As we read the paragraph, the names of people and places hold meaning, yet, they are distant and difficult to grasp for the narrator. They become feelings, rather than specific images, especially when he remembers: “My first grade teacher’s name, Laura Cedillos. I wanted her to be my mother, not because she was pretty, but because she was so nice and smelled like flowers (Sáenz 67). And from this statement, we can discern that the narrator has no real love for his mother. He remembers how she smelled like flowers, and this becomes more important than his mother. When he describes a desert south-west playground of cement and dirt, another feeling of his past life comes forward “because we stomped the ground until it was a fine powder. We couldn’t pound anything else but we could pound the dirt (Sáenz 67). These brief, emotional insights, bring to the foreground the conflict and tension concerning the narrator’s past.

Sáenz has an amazing talent for great opening sentences, as shown in the above examples. The opening sentence can define a story. It can transport the reader, quickly, like the jolt we get from a thunderclap that shakes us. The first sentence in “Brother In Another Language” does just that: “Instead of winding up dead, I wound up in a therapist’s office (Sáenz 102). Dramatic focus centers on the narrator, and the events leading up to his need for a therapist. Death being a common fear in everyone, the author invites the reader to be empathetic with his main character.

Sáenz use of precise use of language in that first sentence leads the reader through a unique perspective. Known as a material conditional statement in logic, or better known as “if…then…” statements to people outside philosophy, the reader understands the narrator to be alive, but was almost dead, and the cause is psychological in nature, because he is with a therapist and not in a hospital or courtroom. Also, opening with an adverbial phrase, not the remedial verb phrase sentence, gives the allusion of a complex character and intelligent point-of-view. If the sentence were written, “I wound up in a therapist’s office after trying to kill myself,” we lose the personal touch and his psyche is lost, so goes the unique nature of the narrator. The author is able to expose the thought processes of his narrator, and a simple sentence becomes complex when conveying more than a single event.

At the beginning of a story, the reader has to enter the narrator’s psyche, and become emotionally attached. Saenz shows how this is possible. What makes a great beginning to a story? Clearly, something that does more than just pique the reader’s interest. Literary devices such as dramatic focus, tension and conflict, imagery and word choice, all work together to perform amazing feats upon a reader’s psyche. An inciting event defines the nature of the story, implicitly or explicitly, subtly creating the fictional world that is about to take place.  A great beginning contains emotional power without overwhelming the reader, so that there is a contract between writer and reader, an agreement that if the reader continues investing their mental energy, the writer will give them a great story. For a young writer, Benjamin Sáenz’s talent for making it all look so easy is a lot like watching a superstar athlete simply play their game.