I don’t normally scroll on Facebook. I don’t have time, but during the “Icemageddon” in Mississippi last week with no electricity and my computer dead, I suddenly found myself on my phone, scrolling Facebook every hour (make that every 15 minutes). Trust me, I was not meant to be a pioneer. That said, I did learn a thing or two.

One, people do crazy things when roads ice over. I don’t know how many videos I saw of grown men flying down a hill on a garbage can lid. I guess that’s my home state’s idea of a sled. And then there was the guy who ignored the barricades in front of an underpass that was flooded…that’s the photo at the top of the page…

I  also landed on a post where readers were dissatisfied with a book that everyone raved about. Over and over there were comments like: “I’m having the hardest time getting through this book.” Or “I found it took me several chapters to get into and then it ended up being an all time favorite.” “Or If you can struggle through this one then the next two are so much better.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never stayed with a book I couldn’t get into even if people told me that I’d love it after XX amount of chapters if I stuck with it. I’m sorry, but If a story doesn’t interest me by the end of Chapter 1, I’ll put it down. And before I buy a new author, I always read the sample chapters. That way I know if I’ll like it.

Does that mean I won’t like a story that isn’t action-packed? Or that a writer can’t open with a slow start? No. An example is Raymond Carver’s short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes”. It doesn’t start with a bang, and every sentence doesn’t advance the story the way I usually like. It’s a story about a writer who has writer’s block. He gets a call from his wife and agrees to meet her at a bar. Here’s an early paragraph:

Myers put the vacuum cleaner away. He walked down the two flights and went to his car, which was in the last stall and covered with snow. He got in, worked the pedal a number of times, and tried the starter. It turned over. He kept the pedal down.

Shortly after that paragraph is another one:

As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

No big problem in the opening. The character was doing mundane, boring things. So, why did I keep reading? Because I’d been where the character was–not between stories, but no idea where I was going in the story I was working on. He captured how I focused on everything but the story. it also described how I felt when I didn’t want to deal with a problem I was facing, and I think readers identify with that.

I’d like to say I came up with the idea of this post, but it came from a post on Jane Friedman’s blog by Seth Harwood. You can read it here. Sometimes we do need to slow down our stories to invoke mood, or theme, or develop a character. But as Harwood noted, the character is doing something–he put away, he walked, he drove…

Okay TKZers, how about you? Would or have you read the rest of Carver’s short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes”?