On openings, strangers in cars, and the weather

How the start of my novel has evolved over the years.

Let’s get a little bit personal. I’ve already written a bit about the big writing project I’m struggling with, but I wanted to share something more with you, my loves.

I thought it might be fun to share the opening paragraph of the novel, and talk a bit about the way it’s evolved over the last few rewrites. By “fun” I guess I mean “similar to the feeling of that reoccurring stress dream I have where I really need to pee but the bathroom doesn’t have a door on it, so I have to do it in front of people.”

Below, you’ll find versions of the opening from when I originally had the idea (about a decade ago), through several versions written during the period of intensive work, from 2018 to the present.

Back in 2010, I had an idea for a novel. I’d never written a novel, and I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to write a novel, but I started writing it anyway. It was partly about the weather, and partly based, very loosely, on real events from my life. In 2011, I slapped together the opening chapters, and submitted the excerpt to the Toronto Arts Council for an emerging writer grant. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It’s Monday and I’m walking home from school like usual. I’m sure that I don’t know the man who’s waving at me to come closer to his van. Home is only a few blocks away, but he just pulls halfway into a gas station, blocking the sidewalk in front of me, and calls me over, smiling and waving like we’re old friends, except obviously, we’re not. He tells me I remind him of his friend “Kathy”, and that he thought I was “Kathy” at first, but we can both see I am not her and that he probably never thought that anyway. When he turns his head, the curls around his neck graze the collar of his dusty jean jacket, and it makes me feel like I’m going to sneeze.

You might say I was putting the cart way, way before the horse. The work was unpolished, and I was rustier than the Tin Man at the start of The Wizard of Oz. I hadn’t written fiction in years. Unsurprisingly, I did not get the grant. Nor did I get very far in the draft.

I abandoned this novel (and fiction writing, generally) for the better part of (another) decade. The story was a bit confused in my own mind. My goals were a bit confused, too. It was about a young girl, an older man, the smell of pear trees, and a mysterious organization that controlled the weather. I couldn’t make it work, but I kept returning to the opening scene, in which a teenage girl impulsively gets into a stranger’s car. I was totally haunted by this scenario, which was based on a real situation I experienced when I was about 13 (though I did not get into the car).

When I was in middle school and panic was high in the eastern Toronto suburbs about the “Scarborough rapist” (who eventually turned out to be serial killer Paul Bernardo), men tried several times to give me a lift home in their vans, their hatchbacks, their dusty sedans. I was a skinny, gangly kid who didn’t look a day older than my actual age, but this happened enough times that I started walking to school with a baseball bat, assuming that given the choice of many kids walking home from school, a would-be assailant would choose a marginally easier target: one without a weapon in her hand.

Decades later, I still couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened to me if I had gotten into one of those cars, so I turned this small piece of the original idea into a short story about a teenage girl who gets into a complicated situation with a stranger in a car. As I worked on the story, I kept wondering what the adult life of that girl would look like, assuming she survived the experience (spoiler: she does, and what happens to her is probably not what you think!). The short story became the spark for a new novel, the events of which take place 20 years later, when the young girl is a 35 year old woman.

In 2018, I started noodling with a new opening to this new novel:

I have had a sinking feeling all week that the upset stomach that’s been dogging me at work all week is more than just a case of bad shrimp. It’s the last week of this temp assignment so I decide that today’s the day, I’ll do it during my lunch break and if the results are catastrophic maybe I just won’t come back. This agency has been good to me but right now, the only thing I can think about is the fact that I might be pregnant with the child of a man whose last name I definitely never learned.

This opening really, really didn’t work, and neither did the whole approach of making my main character a hot mess with a bad attitude. I scrapped it and started again.

By 2019, the new opening paragraph was this:

A splash of water on my cheek wakes me, and shreds of my dream dissolve into blackness as I push my sleep mask onto my forehead. I look up, expecting to see a leak in my ceiling. Instead, it’s a cross-hatched pattern of branches, releasing dribbles of collected rain. I scramble to my knees, panic sending a knifepoint of pain between my shoulder blades. This is not my bed. My eyes adjust to the inky pre-dawn sky as I scan my surroundings for anything I recognize until finally my gaze lands on house-shaped playground structure I see every day from my living room window. I’m in McGregor Park, across the street from my bed. I’m soaked. There’s an acorn cap stuck in my hair. I hear the distant murmur of the departing thunderstorm. I wipe my muddy hands on my thighs and run to my door, open and swaying in the cold wind. It’s never been this bad before. 

I liked this opening, but urged by the advice of countless writing podcasts and literary agents on Instagram, I rewrote it again, because apparently, everyone hates a book that opens with a person waking up from a dream. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

The story morphed. Instead of being about an angry, messy 30-something whose life is upended by an unplanned pregnancy, it turned into a story about a woman learning how to embrace her heritage and reconnect to her family in order to cope with an unplanned pregnancy. This was around the time my mother was dying, and I infused the new concept with a lot of details that came straight from my own family experience.

Alongside my work on the new novel, I polished up the short story about the teenage girl, titled it Nowhere Real, and submitted it to the Antigonish Review. To my delight, they accepted it for publication, and it appeared in their winter 2019/20 issue.

Buoyed by the success of my short story (my first submission and my first acceptance!), I tried again. A new opening paragraph emerged:

The bathroom door is no match for the booming voices of the men, which sound like they’re coming from inside the tub. I lie on the cool floor, staring at the pregnancy test in my hand, its two parallel lines staring back. Two. The clink of glasses and uproarious laughter floats up the stairs and wafts in under the door. Are they just telling jokes, or good-naturedly mocking my brother-in-law Alex, an easy target as the only non-Serb at the party? Impossible to tell with one ear pressed to the ceramic tile. My mother shuffles around, checking on plates and barking cheerfully at dad to refill glasses. I pull myself up and sit with my head against the door, trying to eavesdrop now. A tear escapes my left eye and I rub at it before it has the chance to roll down my cheek.

This was written in the first year of the pandemic, around the time my mother was dying. I put it away for a year while I was unable to do much but grieve and survive. A year later, I decided that I owed it to myself and to my mom to see the project through.

I took a “finish your novel” master class with writer Ibi Kaslik, who had previously taught a class I took and enjoyed through the University of Toronto’s continuing education department. Over the summer of 2022, I met on zoom every week with Ibi and four other writers and wrote tens of thousands of words. My whole middle! My whole third act! By October, I had a completed 87,000 word draft.

I was exhausted, so I put the draft in a drawer and let it (and myself) rest for a few months. By the spring of 2023, it was time to start turning it into something more readable.

I’ve rewritten the opening 20 pages of this thing more times than I can count. But I’m only on my second go at rewriting the entire manuscript. It’s going slowly, but notes from a mentor who is helping me along have been encouraging. I hope to have something polished (ish) by early next year. That’s about a year later than I had originally hoped for, and I am, as discussed in previous Substacks, deeply impatient, but I’m trying to remind myself that the journey matters more than the goal. The journey, perhaps, is the goal.

Here’s where the opening stands now, at “official second draft” status. The story’s changed a lot. It now includes some speculative and fantastical elements based in climate science and Slavic folklore, which were always there in my heart, but not always on the page. It remains a book about the weather. And, about a girl.

Pinpricks of sweat tiptoe across  my forehead as I slide down to the cool grey tile of the bathroom floor. The faucet’s still running, to give the impression I still have some reason to be in here. I shut my eyes  and grip the smooth, white stick in my left hand like it’s an oxygen mask and my plane is going down. I press my ear to the bathroom door, letting the ebb and flow of the party downstairs distract me. My father’s voice rises above the din, still as commanding as it was when I was a child, but gruffer.

“Of course, the branch fell because of strong wind,” he says from the living room. “We have more bad storms. Gala can tell you all about it, it’s her job to talk about storms.”

“Not exactly,” my sister shouts back from somewhere else, perhaps the kitchen.

“But why do the branches really fall?” dad continues.

I reach up to turn off the faucet.

“Nobody wants another theory,” Gala says, and a few voices knowingly chuckle. The clink of wine glasses and scrape of cake plates. A tray is set down.

“Where’s Stasha?” my uncle asks, and a muffled reply comes from somewhere too far for me to hear. Here I am, on the bathroom floor, trying to settle the rock of panic tumbling in my stomach. Downstairs, the couch creaks and I track my uncle’s footsteps from living room to kitchen, the screen door opening, then closing. Out for a smoke. My phone buzzes in my pocket, a text from Nick.

You won’t believe what I found in the Byng Ave basement.

I think this opening works better than the previous ones, though one early reader has noted that sweat runs, it doesn’t tiptoe. So, that might change in the third draft.

I’m feeling good about where the draft is right now. And yet, I recently submitted my first two chapters to an “opening chapters contest” and didn’t even make it onto the longlist. Win some, lose some, keep going. The journey is the goal. Stop being so impatient. Ugh!

What do you think? Is it starting to read more like the opening of something you’d pick up (or put on your library holds list)?