The first sentence, part 1: Gifted

I was never convinced by novels written in the first person present tense. You know:

So I’m standing on the corner when this dog comes racing across the road and starts barking at me…

Sure it’s immediate… but four hundred pages of this? No way…

…until I found myself wondering about my own novel Gifted.

This was way, way back in 2009: I’d written several drafts in the usual godlike third-person past tense and the first chapter began with a female police detective entering a monastery:

The door was aware of her presence from the moment she stepped into the corridor. It heard the prior say, ‘Have you met a forensic sorcerer before?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘They’re difficult.’
Energy flowed from the heart of the door to its surface. The wood swelled and creaked.
Inside the studio, Frank Sampson looked round. There was a cat splayed out on its back on the bench in front of him, its ribcage open like a tattered book. He held a scalpel in one hand, the animal’s heart between the thumb and first finger of the other…

Somehow it wasn’t quite working for me. So I took a deep breath and knocked up a version of the scene in the first-person present, from Frank’s point of view:

I’ve got a cat’s heart in one hand, and a scalpel in the other, when I hear the creak of wood.
I look round. On the inside of the door, the surface is rippling like a pond disturbed by a gust of wind. That’s the wood swelling, ready for trouble.
I put down the scalpel and drop the heart back into the chest cavity.

…and so on.

I thought I preferred this second version, but I also thought I might just be shooting myself in the foot. So I decided to consult the oracle…

My old pal Chris Bidmead was a script editor and writer on Doctor Who back in the Tom Baker and Peter Davison days. He has long been my goto bunny on all issues literary. I sent him two versions of the first five pages of the story and asked his opinion. He emailed back: ‘First person works.  It’s much more vivid.  I love the way it makes us jump right into the story without gods-eye-view explanations.’

That pretty much decided it. Frank’s story went into the first-person present; and it stayed that way.

And there was an added bonus. Chris latched on to a paragraph on the third page, after Frank’s visitor has got inside his studio:

‘What do you want?’ I get stared at a lot, especially by cops, and I don’t like it.
‘A bit of light, for a start.’
‘I like it like this. Helps me think.’
‘Dark teenage thoughts, no doubt.’
I say, ‘Can I get you anything? Cup of tea? Glass of bat’s blood?’
She grins. ‘You’re up early…’
I’ve been up all night, while the cat’s still fresh. Her arrival means it’s been a waste of time. I’ll have to dump it and start again.

Chris pounced: ‘Suggestion: here’s your opening sentence:  “I’ve been up all night, while the cat’s still fresh.”‘

And he was dead right. The first page of Gifted changed with every new draft — not radically, but in the detail. There was a lot to set up and I had to rewrite it over and over. In the end, I still don’t think I got it quite right… but that opening sentence stuck:

I’ve been up all night while the cat’s still fresh.

It seemed arresting. It made a statement about the kind of book this was going to be. So far, only one reader has objected to it. And he had it in for me anyway.

(To be continued: finding the first sentence for the sequel, ‘Pariah’…)