Elmore Leonard likes to start scenes right in the middle of the scene, as he does, more or less, in the scene above from Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight,” adapted from Leonard’s novel of the same title. At too many Daves, David Quigg considers the virtue of starting an entire book in its middle:
I turned randomly to page 104:
The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thomson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop-bop-bop.
Actually Quigg is considering there a book that talks of starting books in the middle; that larger passage, starting with “I turned…” is from a novel Quigg is reading called Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles; the passage in italics is from Hemingway’s To Have or Have Not. Quigg has a wonderful riff on the Hemingway passage, which he quickly found in yet another book; do check it out.
I suspect the fun of starting in the middle — of being dropped into the middle — derives from being forced to rapidly create, in your mind as you read, a lot of context. It’s the fun of the jumpcut or, from real life, of walking into a room and finding two people in a conversation so heated or otherwise committed that they don’t stop to fill you in; instead, you have to fill the scene in. You become a creator.
PS: One reason I like this scene so much is that Clooney’s ploy here depends, quite perversely, on getting that teller to trust him: to believe his improvised story that the man at the table is his compatriot. “Trust me, I’m a bank robber,” is an odd thing to ask of someone, but it works. So the teller of the tale makes an accomplice of the teller of the bank.
PPS: A few hours after I ran the above, David Quigg, who posted the excerpted excerpt that started this, threw the ball back from over at too many Daves:
playing catch with ideas
One of my best childhood memories comes from just a minute or so after our Cubs managed to miss the World Series by losing their third straight game to Steve Garvey and the San Diego Padres. Twelve years old and mute with dejection, I grabbed my mitt and walked down our driveway to the cul-de-sac. My friend Tim, by no prior arrangement, did the same. He had a baseball. Or I had a baseball. We said nothing. Just played catch for a long time.
For me, there continues to be something simple but sublime about the rhythm of catch, about the straightforward collaboration at the heart of a repetitive act dependent on throwing and catching and throwing and catching. Some other time, I can try to explain why reading a difficult book triggers something like the joy of tossing a frisbee back and forth with my son.
A new post by David Dobbs got me thinking about all this. Yesterday, I caught a ball Amor Towles threw. I tossed it out into the world again. Dobbs caught it and tossed it. And now I’m catching it.
Here’s part of what Dobbs wrote, reacting to my post about a Towles character who experiments with starting books on page 104:
I suspect the fun of starting in the middle — of being dropped into the middle — derives from being forced to rapidly create, in your mind as you read, a lot of context. It’s the fun of the jumpcut or, from real life, of walking into a room and finding two people in a conversation so heated or otherwise committed that they don’t stop to fill you in; instead, you have to fill the scene in. You become a creator.
The pleasure here is not just that Dobbs threw something; it’s that he hit my mitt by making sense and making me think. His “you become the creator” insight harmonizes with something Tom Stoppard wrote in “Reflections on Ernest Hemingway”:
The words rely very much on what the reader brings to them. In fact, it is the associative power of words rather than their “meaning” that makes prose work on its ultimate level. It seems to me that Hemingway’s achievement, whether calculated or instinctive, was to get his effects by making the reader do the work.
Maybe starting in the middle supercharges this phenomenon.
OK. That’s all I’ve got.
Catch!
