Begin (Again): The Art of Openings
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
Plato, The Republic
How do you feel about epigraphs? My partner once said she hated them, at least in the context of academic writing. Why not just get straight to what you want to say? Many readers find them pretty easy to skip over (as I’m sure at least a couple of you did when approaching this blog post) and if used incorrectly they can easily become unnecessary filler, pretentious excess, or both. After all, you don’t need Plato to tell you that “the beginning is the most important part of the work,” and except for this bit I won’t really be talking about ancient Greek philosophers at all. All it really does is add a bit of pageantry to a pretty straightforward series of blog posts on writing and reading introductions.
But that pageantry does have a purpose, it does something for the reader, however slight … right? But is that the right approach? Moreover, when does it work? At this point in my dissertation process — writing and rewriting what will become the first pages of my first chapter — an obsession with how to start things has caught me in a loop of rewriting.
This is, of course, a common problem. I have also been told that knowing it is a common problem doesn’t make it any easier to overcome. In the words of one of my advisors, academic writing is one of those skills that actually gets more difficult as you have more experience with it. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I realize it has taken me a longer time to write six pages now than it did to churn out thirty my first year in grad school, or when I scroll through the many versions of my prospectus while trying to find a particular source.
There have been plenty of blog posts discussing writing tips or offering methods for staying on task, and plenty more discussing the difficult and often isolating process of writing a dissertation (some of which are on this very site). These posts can be incredibly helpful and inspirational for the desperate graduate student looking at the long road of dissertation writing, due to the writer’s clever way of staying on task and/or their honesty about their struggles. However, seeing as I have not yet found an intuitive way of managing my time and already tend to overanalyze my writing struggles, I’d like to take a different approach. The goal of this series of posts is to make this reading material accessible and light, even for those without a lot of background in textual studies.
If my work in literary adaptation and new media have taught me anything, it would be that you can learn something from every text, no matter which medium or genre you are interested in. With that in mind, I am going to take a close look at some of my favorite opening moments in texts across print, film, and video games to see what makes them so memorable. With any luck, these deep dives will reveal something about what makes a good introduction in any genre, and just maybe help me break out of my writer’s block. If nothing else, it’ll be a great way to get back in touch with what got me into this line of work in the first place.
John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.