"Playing with different beginnings to find the right moment to enter the story": Amanda Dennis on first pages
I started over with a scene of arrival
Amanda Dennis
Born in Philadelphia, Amanda Dennis studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her debut novel, Her, Here launches March 9, 2021 with Bellevue Literary Press.
Amanda, thanks for sitting down to talk about your first pages tips. What was your process when writing Her Here? Do you tend to plan everything out and know what you'll say in your first five pages or just start writing?
AD: Her Here began with a character’s voice and me chasing after it, in a room in the highest part of Paris with plenty of views and plenty of sky. This room was sort of like a mind, and that’s part of why my old opening—refined over years—didn’t work. For a long time, my first line was “I’d rather be her than here.” The novel had a different working title, so this wasn’t egregious, but the pages had other problems. Now, I love that the title Her Here shows the scar of an old opening, an homage to what was sacrificed.
My character (whose voice I was chasing) is chasing another voice, younger and more passionate, whose vitality she craves and will embody later in the book. But because I needed my protagonist cerebral at the start, I did the thing people tell you never to do. I began with a person alone in a room (waking up from troubled dreams—another taboo, unless you’re Kafka). I reasoned: my character is philosophically-oriented, a searcher. Didn’t modern philosophy begin with a man in his room? Let’s make it a woman! Besides, Paul Auster has a riveting one-man opening (City of Glass).
For years, I rewrote my first pages, polishing the language. “Her” and “here” layered over one another, every word positioned perfectly, with the right rhythms and poetic intensity. But novels need life, blood, characters in situations. Readers crave and expect from novels what they would never ask of Descartes. I needed something more than language at play in an airy room, so isolated, so much like a mind.
A writer friend persuaded me to scrap my old opening, saying it didn’t do justice to the book. I started over with a scene of arrival, a taxi through Paris, and an encounter with a stranger. My protagonist is mistaken for someone else. Her reaction—spooked and delighted—lets the reader see her, on the square one morning June, wondering what the hell she’s doing in Paris.
I have been up all night and now the day is gray, the narrow streets slick and silvered outside the taxi window.
Is this the same approach you take with other writing projects?
It’s fairly usual for me to start with a voice and keep writing. I have to run with it a little to see what the piece is about. Then I step back and do some careful planning. The difference now is that I’m more likely to let go of the germ of the book and restructure. I plot carefully, but I also try to stay open to the story, accepting a limit to what I can know in advance—that’s how the work can outstrip my limits, how the magic gets in.
How about as a reader, what do you notice the most about others' first pages?
I’m drawn in by a strong voice, emotional precision, and attention to language. Voice has to do with style and boldness, with well-crafted sentences that reflect the quirkiness of the sensibility shaping them. It also demands sensitivity to sound and rhythm. Voice is bodily too.
Can you think of a 'forever first page'? An opening that has stayed with you?
Beckett’s Murphy has a stunning first line: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” You hear a voice—wise, world-weary, and humorous—and the perspective shifts refreshingly beyond the human, asking what alternatives the sun might have (the book goes on to satirize obsessions with fate, horoscopes, and planetary alignments). It also riffs on the book of Ecclesiastes—nothing new under the sun—taking a well-worn phrase and enlivening it. Marquez’s opening to Love in the Time of Cholera is a close second for its sensual particularity: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” I love language that stimulates and refreshes perception.
Are you working on a new novel and if so, how are you handling your new first pages?
My new novel is about a group of frustrated idealists who flee the city to an island in Denmark, where they make their own energy. My approach to the first pages is different. I’ve written several openings: my character’s last conversation with her father, who dies at a solar station in Morocco, her childhood in intentional communities, the search for a water source on the island. My latest draft starts with the dystopia of the city—a flood and gridlocked traffic, ambulances stationary with their sirens blaring—with my character’s first, irreversible impulse to leave. Playing with different beginnings helps me feel out just the right moment to enter the story.
That sounds like a novel for our times, Amanda. Thank you for this inspiring dive into your process. Readers, you can pre-order Her, Here now. Polish up those first pages and enter First Pages Prize 2021 by Sunday 7 February 23:59 p.m. Pacific Time (or Feb 21 extended).
“Dazzling. Dennis is a writer that awakens the senses. From the first page, this gorgeous, haunting story about two lost girls ensnares the reader with such expertise, such intelligence and heart, that before long you’re lost inside the eerie sensuality of youthful dreams, witnessing obsession unravel identity.” ―Dina Nayeri, author of Refuge and The Ungrateful Refugee
