Favorite first lines

My novel, The Big Empty, is featured in a book blog tour put on by Lone Star Literary Life. One of the cool things they did was ask me for the first line of book, then created this spiffy graphic. 

I worked really hard on that line, and it wasn’t how the book originally started. What’s now Chapter 2 was the original beginning for the book. In those early drafts, the first lines were:

Trace Malloy’s fist landed firmly in the middle of the other man’s nose. He could feel the bridge give under the force of his knuckles, and he knew he’d broken it. It wasn’t much of a punch, just a quick jab that he pulled back instantly, as if to say he was sorry.

While that opening was dramatic, it didn’t give the readers a chance to get to know the characters. The punch in the nose represents an unusual lack of control for Malloy, and the punchee, Blaine Witherspoon immediately crumples to the floor, calls Malloy a bully, and threatens to sue him. 

I wanted to give the characters more time to introduce themselves before I jumped into the conflict between them, so I added the preface and the first chapter. 

I think the new first line is still dramatic, and hopefully catches the reader’s attention. It gave me a chance to introduce both men and show a little bit about them as they sort through the aftermath of the collision. 

Lone Star Lit’s first lines exercise got me thinking of other first lines that I like. One of my favorites is from Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side:

From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five.

It sets up the moment when New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor sacks the Washington Redskins’ quarterback, Joe Theismann, breaking Theismann’s leg so horribly that the fracture could be heard on national television. It was a dramatic moment, and one that forever changed the game of football. (Taylor came from Theismann’s blind side.) That one moment defined the reason that the National Football League started looking for bigger, faster offensive tackles like Michael Oher, the subject of the book.  

Another of my favorite first lines is from a very different type of book, Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: 

The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

And, of course, Hunter S. Thompson’s opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

I also loved the first line from The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books,Edward Wilson-Lee’s epic story of Christopher Columbus’ son and his efforts to build the world’s greatest library. 

On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed.

I just started reading The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. Much of the story is set in Cyprus, which is a place near to my heart. The opening resonated perfectly with my own feelings:    

Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that the many travellers, pilgrims, crusaders and merchants who fell in love with it either wanted never to leave or tried to tow it with hemp ropes all the way back to their own countries. 

It’s a wonderful, magical book that I’m sure I’ll be writing about in the future.

This is far from a complete list, of course. What are some of your favorites? 

Greed and consequences: what Hollywood missed

Last month, I wrote about the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” on my Forbes blog. I expanded on that piece for an op/ed that the Houston Chronicle ran over the weekend:

The Oscar buzz this year is dominated by two movies about con men: “American Hustle” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” “Hustle” is a fictionalized tale about Abscam, the FBI bribery sting in the late 1970s that used a low-level swindler to ensnare a federal and state politicians.

“Wolf” is based on a self-aggrandizing memoir by Jordan Belfort, a penny stock promoter in the 1990s who ran Stratton Oakmont, a Long Island bucket shop. The faux anglophile sophistication of the firm’s name belied the baseness of its actions: Belfort and his cronies stole hundreds of millions from investors, much of which he has yet to repay.

“Hustle” leaves the viewer to ponder the nature of greed – was it Christian Bale’s con man or Bradley Cooper’s FBI agent who was more beholden to it? “Wolf,” by all accounts, is a voyeuristic smorgasbord of excess and debauchery that ignores the pain that Belfort’s fraud inflicts on his victims. Because it’s based on Belfort’s own account, it can’t help but engage in self-promotion. Joel Cohen, who prosecuted Belfort, noted in a recent blog post that the film’s ending is basically an ad for the “motivational speaking” business Belfort started after leaving prison. The wolf, it seems, has conned Martin Scorsese, one of Hollywood’s best living directors, into helping him launch his next scheme.

Leonardo DiCaprio, who portrays the self-styled wolf in the film, has said glorifying the hedonism while ignoring the victims’ plight was deliberate. He told the New York Daily News: “We purposely didn’t show (Belfort’s) victims. We wanted the film to be a hypnotic ride the audience gets on so they get lost in this world and not see the destruction left in the wake of this giant ship of greed.”

Without the victims’ perspective, it’s difficult to put that brutality of Belfort’s actions in focus. Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” in contrast, showed the clear consequences of financial fraud. The audience saw the toll that Gordon Gekko’s amoral philosophy had on ordinary people, including Bud Fox’s father.

The excesses of making lots of money are indeed hypnotic. Financial fraud works because money is an end so desirable that we often overlook the means. Few understood that better than Jordan Belfort. In the 1990s, I wrote a lot about penny stock fraud, including some of Belfort’s touts. As a reporter, I wanted to believe I was providing a public service by exposing stock manipulation. Often, though, I found the harshest criticism of my stories came from the victims, the stock buyers who refused to believe, until it was too late, that they were being conned. In some cases, they were so hypnotized by the promise of easy money, they didn’t care.

t’s easy to dismiss victims of fraud as suckers or rubes, people who are so greedy they get what they deserved. But if nothing else, “The Wolf of Wall Street” stands as a reminder, much like Allen Stanford’s far larger swindle a few years ago, that fraud isn’t something that just happens. It’s carefully planned. It’s designed to separate people from their money. Our desire to succeed, our need for financial security, our fear of poverty and failure – all are weapons in the con man’s arsenal.

People like Belfort and Stanford are more comfortable with lies than truth. Lies become the tools that, combined with a lack of conscience, enable them to prey on the fears and desires of unwary investors and separate them from their money. That is an important part of the Jordan Belfort story – in fact, the most important part – but it’s missing from the film. Even as Hollywood is bragging about his exploits, Belfort still owes millions to his victims. Perhaps “The Wolf of Wall Street” will help him recoup some of that, and in that way, perhaps victims will benefit. Belfort has said he plans to use proceeds from his books and the movie to repay them, but that offer came only after the prosecutors in Brooklyn filed a motion to find him in default on his court-ordered restitution. Meanwhile, the film is enabling him to reach a wider audience. It has propelled his book to the top of the best-seller list and the website for his motivational speeches touts the movie as part of its sales pitch.

In an age of “reality TV” in which spoiled children, hairy rednecks and dysfunctional motorcycle mechanics are all stars playing to a voyeuristic audience, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is just one more freak show for the audience to savor. Indeed, Belfort is apparently in talks to host his own “reality” show.

With Hollywood’s help, it may be his greatest con yet.

The Wealthiest Texans list

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The latest issue of Texas Monthly has its annual list of wealthiest Texans. Many of the subjects of these sorts of lists hate them. They would prefer to be known for their achievements, their success or their charity rather than simply for their wealth.

Wealth, of course, can be a measure of success and achievement, but certainly with a lengthy list like this one, there isn’t room to do in-depth profiles of each person. What you get is a snapshot rather than a rich portrait, if you’ll pardon the pun.

“Rich lists” and other rankings have been a part of business reporting for as long as I’ve been doing it. In some ways, business is always about keeping score, and many of those on the list have a pretty good idea of where they rank long before they see it in print. So do politicians, non-profit leaders and endowment-seeking universities.

For the rest of us, though, these lists have a different sort of value. They remind us that money is power — it’s the gateway to access and influence.  We need to know whose footsteps echo loudest in the halls of power.

What value, if any, do you find in these rankings of wealth?

This year, I contributed some of the entries to Texas Monthly’s list. Can you guess which ones? 

Michael Dell prevails in takeover fight — now what?

Here’s my update for Texas Monthly on the takeover battle for Dell Inc., which was finally put to a shareholder vote and approved last week. Now that the seven-month battle is behind him, Michael Dell must implement the big changes he’s promised quickly, while the company is still flush with revenue from the declining PC business.

Read more here. 

`Dell and Back:’ My Texas Monthly debut

Not all investors are happy with Michael Dell’s buyout offer.

A few weeks ago, the editors at Texas Monthly asked me to write a piece about the buyout battle being waged for Dell Inc. I covered Dell in the 1990s and early 2000s, and I jumped at the chance. The shareholder vote on the buyout was supposed to take place Thursday morning, but it was delayed.

So the magazine decided to post my article on its web site, along with a short update from me at the top.  (If you prefer to read it in print, the next issue should be on shelves soon.)

The delay of the vote isn’t a good sign for Michael Dell’s plan to take his company private, although I still believe he’s likely to prevail. I’ll be doing another update for the TM website next week when the vote is supposed to be concluded.

Writing on platforms old and new

Things have been a little quiet on this blog for the past week or so, in part because I’m getting a handle on juggling different writing assignments on many different platforms. In case you missed it, I recently started blogging about energy issues at Forbes.com. 

A post last week on the resentencing of fallen Enron chief Jeff Skilling prompted my former Bloomberg colleague Chris Roush to ask me for a related post for his Talking Biz News site. 

And I’m wrapping up a magazine piece that should be out in a few weeks. More on that later.  All of this, of course, comes as a backdrop to my new day job as a senior writer with 30 Point Strategies.

As busy as my schedule has been, I did have to pause to enjoy this email from my friends at Amazon.com. I guess their marketing algorithms really do understand what we readers like….

The Sinking of the Bounty

I spent much of the Memorial Day weekend catching up on periodicals, and one in particular is worth noting. Matthew Shaer’s piece for the Atavist on The Sinking on the Bounty is both a griping read and a great example of how an electronic format can enhance long-form narratives. Interspersed with the text are weather maps tracing the path of Hurricane Sandy and video of some of the Bounty’s crew being rescued by the Coast Guard.

Fortunately, it’s rare for a tall sailing ship to sink in a storm these days, but as I read Shaer’s account, I found myself thinking how many other ships, many of which are now being excavating and studied by archaeologists, must have gone down in the much the same way.