Sometimes the first thing you write is perfect. Sometimes it’s perfect shit.

Take openings. They are so important that a well-known book for writers is titled The First Five Pages in recognition of the fact.

To Love Mercy originally began something like, ‘It was a bright sunny day and Steve Feinberg was dreaming about the White Sox game he would go to that night’ blah blah blah blah blah. That sort of opening persisted through many drafts because I just couldn’t imagine not explaining the background before I launched into the story itself.

Then I met Tim Junkin.

Tim is the author of a lyrical first novel (The Waterman) and several other novels, and Bloodsworth, the remarkable story of the first inmate exonerated via DNA evidence. I took Tim’s first workshop at the Writers Center in Bethesda MD. It was a painful experience. Tim is a terrific guy but a tough taskmaster, a Marine Corps drill sergeant. He kicked my first chapter’s ass all the way around the block.

He was right of course. By the time he got done with me, the first line of the first chapter read much as it now reads:

By the time I get back, …

That, if I say so myself (and thanks to Tim Junkin), is a hell of an opening line.

First, it acts to throw you off balance. What “time”? Who is “I”? “Back” from where? And it’s a dependent clause, which makes you feel like you’re overhearing a conversation. In just six words, O gentle reader, you are hooked. At the least, you must finish this first sentence to look for answers to the questions raised by those first six words.

The rest of the first sentence does answer some questions, but it raises new ones:

… Dad and Grandpa are standing in the gangway, smoking.

OK. We’ve learned that the speaker is a kid (”Dad and Grandpa”). But “smoking”? Not too many smokers these days. Maybe this story takes place in the past. Maybe this particular Dad and Grandpa are different than some Dads and Grandpas who don’t smoke, and therefore interesting. Maybe I’ll just read one more sentence and find out …

But the rest of the first paragraph only deepens the mystery and,importantly, stirs in tension:

They’re talking about Earl Caldwell’s single, the one that won
it, but they look nervous. I know Dad is going to be mad because
I took so long with the autograph. But something else is the
matter too.

Who is Earl Caldwell? What autograph? What else could be the matter? Hopefully, in four sentences, I’ve got you where I want you.

And good thing too, because almost immediately I take a big risk. In the fifth paragraph, Steve launches into what I think of as his “aria.” It is an extended disquisition on the prospects of the 1948 White Sox that concludes, Rickie says they’re crummy and he’s going to start rooting for the Cubs.

This “aria” is 189 words long and comes on the first page of the novel. The risk is that it comes too early — that you get bored and put down the book.

But the “aria” is there for a purpose. It establishes Steve’s “voice” — breathless, naive, un-self-conscious, engaging, a little nerdy. If I haven’t lost you, you are beginning to see how you might fall in love with this kid.

Then, near the bottom of Page 2, Steve utters this throwaway line:

Well, a colored guy with a push broom.

But it is not a throwaway line at all. It’s a crashing discord, a G-minor eleventh. It is the first of countless occurrences of the word “colored” — a word rich with implications and resonances, a word that tells you everything about the time and the speaker. The rest of the line speaks volumes too. It suggests not only how “a colored guy” must earn a living in the period of the novel; but also that our protagonist, Steve, not even 10 years old, already is aware of the role a “colored guy” must play in this society.

The author of The First Five Pages, Noah Lukeman, might well have titled his book “The First Two Pages.” In our short-attention-span era, a book must grab you in the first two or three pages, or not at all.

The opening lines of To Love Mercy are meant to seem artless — the anxious musings of a young Jewish boy who has lingered too long getting a baseball player’s autograph, and now fears the anger of his father and grandfather. But artless they are not. By the time I deemed my novel “finished,” I had considered and reconsidered every word. I’d read it so many times, I’d half-committed the entire novel to memory. Which is why, when I’m lying half-awake half-asleep at night, phrases like A colored guy with a push broom still push their way into my consciousness.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Saturday night in Bethesda! Come to Barnes & Noble at 6 p.m Saturday, Aug. 19. B&N is at the corner of Bethesda and Woodmont Avenues, two blocks west of Wisconsin Avenue. If you missed me at Politics & Prose, this is a perfect opportunity.

P.P.S. I was in Chicago last Thursday to tape my Channel 7-ABC appearance on “Chicagoing” with Bill Campbell. It went REALLY well. The show will air Sunday, Oct. 1 (not Aug. 20 as I had been informed previously). If you are in the Channel 7 viewing area, I hope you’ll tune in Sunday, Oct. 1, at 11 a.m.

Last blog, I dropped a throwaway line about City News Bureau of Chicago “where I learned the craft of journalism and how to impersonate a deputy coroner.” My Web guru, Brian Lieberman, took the bait and asked what that stuff was about. Here’s what I wrote to Brian.

At City News Bureau, which truly was boot camp for cub reporters, you were taught to do whatever it took to get the story. If you had to steal papers off of someone’s desk, or peek through a keyhole, you were not discouraged from doing so. (Remember, we’re in Chicago. Even though it’s 1962 and an era is about to end, anything still goes. This sort of journalism is memorialized, hilariously and with only slight exaggeration, in “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, one of my favorite plays and movies of all time.)

One thing City News kids did every day was “coroner cases,” deaths reported to the Cook County Coroner because they were suspicious or abnormal in some way. Most of these coroner cases were not stories, and we could tell the office they were “cheap” and to “cheap them out.”

(In some cases, a coroner case would be “cheaped out” because the party involved was “blue,” i.e. black, and a story that otherwise would have been news was not because of the ethnicity of the “dead one”. I am not making this up.)

Early on in my City News career, I was on assignment in the Hyde Park police station and a difficult coroner case landed in my lap. I tried the usual ways to get the story and failed. I called the office and tried to cheap it out but they wouldn’t go for it; Get the story, kid, they said. I knew my colleagues sometimes impersonated deputy coroners on the phone, so I decided to try that.

I called the home.

“Hello?”

“This is Deputy Coroner Ellickson.”

“Who is this?”

“Deputy Coroner, uh, Ellickson.”

“Just a minute.” Pause of discussion in background. New voice comes on the phone.

“Who is this?”

“This is, um, er, uh, Deputy Coroner Ellickson.”

“THIS is Deputy Coroner Ellickson!”

It was a Mel Gibson moment. I decided I would be an ethical journalist for the rest of my career. Assuming I had one.

Postscript on coroner cases: Much later in my City News career, I was working the overnight shift at Central Police Headquarters and got another coroner case. I was dead tired. I knew this case had the makings of a story, but a difficult one that would require calling the family, and I just didn’t have the stomach for it at 4 a.m. So I called the desk and tried to cheap it out.

The deskman, Paul Zimbrakos, caught on and meted out a classic City News punishment. Not only did he make me call the family and get the story, he made me call back because I didn’t have the dead one’s hobbies, call back again because I didn’t have his early childhood history, call back again because I didn’t have the color of his eyes, etc. etc. etc. I worked that story until 10 or 11 a.m. the following day. It never went on the wire.

Paul went on to become the final chief of CNB. He was at his desk, still pushing kids around, in early December 2005, the final month of City News’s 106-year existence. I dropped by for the first time since the ’60s to pay my last respects.

Paul was kind of busy working a story about a Southwest Airlines plane skidding off an icy runway at Midway Airport. He was barking orders into a phone, yelling at people to do this and that, and motioning me to a seat all at the same time. He had a computer and a cubicle, and he now looks like Foxy Grandpa. Otherwise, absolutely nothing had changed. “Siddown Frank, I’m a little busy,” he said, like I’d just been there the day before. Eventually he got off the phone and we had a most pleasant chat. On December 31, 2005, the doors of City News Bureau closed forever.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. We’ve just booked an October trip to Borders stores in the Pittsburgh area, Columbus, Dayton and the Cincinnati area. Check http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_appearances.html for the latest.

P.P.S. There are 19 5-star reviews of To Love Mercy now posted on Amazon.com.  The newest are from ArmchairInterviews.com, a Writer’s Digest “Top 100″ website; ReaderViews.com; and R. Alkire. See them all at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974478539/103-8242752-9223855?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books&v=customer-reviews

P.P.P.S. Amazon.com has again cut its price for To Love Mercy, to $9.72. Amazon started out at $10.46 before the book was even published. Then it moved to full list, then to $10.46 again, and still the book wasn’t published. Post-publication, the price fell to $9.72, then went back up to $10.46, and now is back to $9.72 again. No one, my publisher included, can explain Amazon’s pricing behavior. All I can say is, go buy a copy before Amazon changes its mind again. Visit http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=br_ss_hs/103-8242752-9223855?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=to+love+mercy&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go