Freele Pesters Rusty Barnes

From time to time, LAR’s Fiction Editor, Stefanie Freele, pesters our contributors for their thoughts on fiction, form, and function. This week, she talks to Rusty Barnes, author of “An Explanation of Love,” LAR Issue 8.

From “An Explanation of Love” by Rusty Barnes: “They say get into the ambulance, go with your wife, and I do. Everyone ignores that she’s not my wife anymore.”

SF: How important is the first line in short fiction?

RB: Incredibly so. You need a reason to keep the reader reading, even and especially in the beginning. Don’t imagine that your wonderful prose will keep people on their butts with their heads in your precious work. You need that prose skill, yes, and for the kind of stories I write, you need a protagonist to appear up front as well, and for other kinds of stories, you need even more strong prose or an unusual idea to keep readers in it to win it. Always remember that attention spans are short and the quicker (and better) you hook readers the better off you’ll be. Beware, though, of too much front-loading. I start many stories with a kind of personalized rubric that I then have to edit out in revisions. Joe Levens, the savvy editor of Summerset Review, pointed out in a discussion that so many stories begin by naming a character ‘X’ in the subject of a sentence and continuing on to have ‘X’ perform some random action while thinking of ‘insert plot point’ here. And I said, uh-oh. I am guilty as all hell.

SF: Does the first line have a job?

RB: The job of the first line is to get a reader to the second line, and also to establish tone. Yes, that job begins with the very first sentence.

SF: Where did the inspiration for this first line (and subsequent story) come from?

RB: I thought of a man in an ambulance who wasn’t hurt, but who had complex stakes tied in with the well-being of the person who was hurt. That was really it. I wrote the whole thing in maybe forty minutes, ran it through the grammar grinder, and there it was. I had always wanted to have a protagonist talking to God, inspired perhaps by the great Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story.”

SF: What is a favorite first line from your own work or another writer?

RB: William Gibson’s first line of the novel Neuromancer has always been a great model: “The sky over Chiba City was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” He doesn’t have a character in the first line, but how could anyone not want to know this book after reading that?

Rusty’s new fiction collection, Mostly Redneck, can be purchased here, and his flash collection, Breaking it Down, can be purchased here.