Just Do It

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

From the moment I read those words, they were seared into my brain as the greatest opening line of any novel I had ever read. For me, the brilliance in the line is not just in it's simplicity, but in the particularly American image it evokes; after all, did you not picture Our Hero chasing the Bad Guy across a dusty land, possibly with a setting sun in the background?

Here's the thing. When this story was first published, if someone said "The Man in Black,", odds are, your first thought was, Johnny Cash. Troubled, sure, but not exactly a villain. And a gunslinger isn't the local lawman; he's a bounty hunter, a gun for hire; and Dirty Harry is now part of our cultural lexicon. You can't tell a hero by his white hat, and suddenly things are a lot more complicated. Our classic Western trope has been turned on its ear in a simple and subtle way. The gunslinger may be chasing the Man in Black, but the reader may not want him to be successful. This is a world colored in shades of gray.

Stephen King wrote "The Gunslinger" in 1982, and I'm sure I first picked up a copy sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, after I had recovered from the psychological trauma of reading "The Shining", and was ready to dip my toe back into King-infested waters. I haven't read it in years, and have always intended to reread it and finish the rest of the books in the series, but just never got around to it. I loved it, though, and I think this one line made me fall in love with the written word in a way that nothing else did. I had read genre books before, but this book was like all genres in one: Western, thriller, romance, fantasy, time travel, science fiction - you name it, it was in there. And to top it all off, King based the whole series upon a poem by Robert Browning.

When I talk to people about doing NaNoWriMo, or about writing in general, the two things I hear most often are that people wish they had the time to write, and that they never know how to start their book. As far as the time thing goes, I think people can always find time to do the things they want to do, if they really want to do them. As to the other, that's never been a problem for me. I don't think that my opening line needs to be the Greatest Sentence in the History of Mankind. Stephen King beat me to it, and now the pressure is off. I'm the writer; this is my story, and only I know how to tell it. I picture my scene, put my fingers on the keyboard, begin at the beginning, and go from there.