Preface

LOREM IPSUM

Or, This Is a Book About

by Me

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”

— Albert Camus

(Beginning a story is difficult. To start with, you can never really start at the start. This is a particularly startling revelation to have, as a writer. Because you have to start somewhere.

Some writers start in medias res. That’s a fancy way of saying “in the middle of the story.” More literally, it means “into the midst of things.” It was coined by the poet Horace—whose real name wasn’t Horace at all, but Quintus Horatius Flaccus—in his seminal work Ars Poetica. Horace is one of those old white dudes that just won’t die. His ghost haunts the pages of the last 2,000 years of literature and literary criticism. You can put him in the same box as Cicero, Aristotle, and Pope, if you’d like, although I generally caution against putting too many humans into a single box. There’s no hard and fast rule for what you can get away with, really, but most professional box-stuffers use this formula devised by Lena Oglethorpe, the first recorded professional contortionist and logistics manager:

That’s the volume of the box minus the volume of the human times the flexibility coefficient, where 1 is infinitely flexible and 10 is completely rigid. If you manage to get a number larger than zero: good job! The body will fit. Probably. There’s a lot of holes in this formula, so I wouldn’t think too hard about it. In fact, please stop thinking about it right this instant.

Have you stopped? Great. Good. You’re going to do well here.

And even if you do manage to squeeze all those writers into that box, you’ll probably earn the ire of a few PhD candidates in the process. They might grab their Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and frantically point to the highlighted passages, stating that these four authors weren’t even contemporaneous, that they have very different legacies and qualitative philological—not to mention philosophical—distinctions… But I wouldn’t worry too much about that, reader. These aren’t the worst people to piss off. They’re more or less pissed about everything, anyway. They’re critics. That’s their thing.

The point is that some writers start in the middle and that other writers, like Horace, support this choice. It gives the reader an immediate interest, some pressing issue that keeps you turning the pages while simultaneously wondering, “How the hell did we get here?” The writer almost inevitably circles back to fill in the necessary details. We discover that the protagonist has a spooky, scary secret. Maybe. Or perhaps they’ve been conscripted into an Adventure by a Wily Stranger in order to fulfill a Prophecy. Or perhaps… I don’t need to go through all the options. I’m sure you get the picture.

But some writers prefer to be more linear, to start at what they consider to be the beginning of the story. In this case, perhaps they start with the protagonist going about his day: dreary, complacent, depressed. That is, until our Wily Stranger arrives and etc., etc. … But coining this moment as “the beginning” presents a bit of an issue, doesn’t it? Because in order for our protagonist to be called upon by Gandalf the Wily Stranger, they need to be there to begin with. There clearly must have been events that led up to that moment. One imagines that our protagonist had a childhood, for example. So the beginning of their story started earlier. Much earlier.

You could start with birth, then. Slave narratives often use this beginning: “I was born…” It’s a statement that doesn’t really need stating. Everyone I know was born. Certainly, any person capable of writing the phrase “I was born” was born. And until we grant robots personhood or begin using artificial human wombs, that will always be the case. Still, “I was born” is a wonderfully affirming phrase, a way of celebrating your own improbable existence. It also marks our protagonist’s true beginning.

Except it doesn’t. Because, as an organism, you don’t begin as a baby exiting the womb. You begin as two haploid cells meeting.

So maybe writers should start with conception, although this would make autobiography awkward. No one really wants to imagine their parents having sex, let alone spend a few moments of their time dramatizing the action. But it also makes fiction difficult, because you’d have to consider the manner in which it happened. Was there foreplay involved? Did the protagonist’s mother have an orgasm or is their father a stingy lover? Was it even consensual? Does the reader really want to start every story with sex, and does this make the very act of storytelling inherently pornographic? And the more pressing issue, given our current line of reasoning, is that this isn’t the beginning either. We can go further back, explain how the protagonist’s parents met. But now we’ve run into the central issue, because in order to adequately explain how they met, we need to trace their stories backward, to their conceptions.

Infinite regression. At this rate you’ll never get to the protagonist’s name, let alone his meeting with Hagrid the Wily Stranger.

So maybe you begin with the creation of the universe. That seems like The Beginning™ that we’ve been searching for. It worked well enough for the Bible and Hitchhiker’s Guide, after all, and those books are pretty darn popular. Just start with the moment that all things sprang inexplicably into being. Don’t bother asking what came before it, because then…

Dammit. You did it, didn’t you? I said don’t bother asking, and you did.

But I can’t be too mad at you, because—truth be told—I did as well. And the answer, reader, is that no one knows for sure. There may have been a beginning before The Beginning™. And there may have been a beginning before that one. And that’s the point I’m trying to make about starting at the start, because if I wanted to do such a thing, I’d have to say something like:

“There were things before things. Maybe. Or else there weren’t.

Or else: there both were and weren’t, because the time before time may have been fundamentally different from the time after things. There’s no way to know what things there were in the time before time, or how those maybe-things may or may not have acted.

All in all: things weren’t, until they were. And that’s where we are now, in the time where things are.

Welcome.

Although, if you can read, you’ve already been here for quite some time, and have probably already been welcomed by quite a few people. I don’t know what you say to a person that has already been welcomed... Wait. Yes, I do!

Hello.”

And maybe you’d like that as a beginning, even if it isn’t The Beginning™.

But I don’t want to contend with the creation of the entire universe. The universe is a big thing, reader, and a little outside my scope as an illustrator. I could paint in broad strokes, so to speak. I could give you the gist of how stars form—hint: it’s gravity—or how planets evolve to support an atmosphere and the conditions for carbon-based life: gravity, again. I could spend twenty pages or so detailing the rise and fall of various civilizations, the material conditions and ideologies that shaped them. I could try to give you a sort of General History of Everything before getting to the story at hand. I could do all of that, but I won’t.

This is a book about beginnings. Because if there is no singular start, no quintessential beginning from which all stories emanate, then that means beginnings are happening all the time. Everything is always beginning. In media res is just as much of a beginning as birth, conception, and the primordial soup. And if beginnings are happening all the time, then that means I can start my story anywhere and anywhen. All of space and time is open to me, dear reader. I admit that this fact is liberating and terrifying in equal measure. It means I can give shape to shapelessness. What a responsibility! What a joy!

It means I can start my story like this: