But I am no Dickens!

Here I am, sitting before the PC, mind as blank as the screen in front.  A hundred insane thoughts swirl around my head but I can't catch hold of any single one to give shape to.  An hour passes, still not a single click on the key-board.  I get up in frustration, go out and have a smoke. Hoping against hope that miraculously a straw will float by to clutch, while drowning.  An idea to grasp furiously and work upon.  It's already an hour since I logged in.  I have seen worse nights and each one feels like the previous one was better.  The tidal wave of hopelessness drowns me as I plunge  deeper and deeper into the abyss...

Here I am, trying to conceive a post for my blog.  I curse myself for bringing about this self-inflicted misery.  No one forced me into this.  Neither is this an exam paper to be finished off in three hours.  Then why this pursuit of madness?  I realise why,but too proud to admit it.  It is that demon called 'ego'.  That inflated sense of one's greatness.  Once upon a day, by chance and fluke, you managed to put together 1000 words, neatly divided into paragraphs which collectively made passable reading.  You  gave it a grandiose title (after wracking the mind for another one hour), posted it in cyberspace, linked it to a couple of other sites, took a deep breath and waited.  The wait produced a response or two, a couple of comments and likes from a little circle and presto, you think you are the next Booker winner. Ah that ego!  Its trail of destruction is legion.   

But coming to think of it, any one can dish out readable prose.   It is only a matter of putting on paper (or the monitor) the first few words.  The beginning.  Because unless the beginning is arresting and captivating, the middle and the end, for whatever they are worth, have a fat chance of being read.  So here I am, like a constipated soul, still searching for those magical first words.  But how were some of the more famous first words created?  What went through the writer's head before the first words popped out?

"Howard Roark laughed"

Simple, unassuming line.  Nothing sensational.  Not very prolific or profound either.  But they do make you go to the second line.  Mission accomplished.  Perhaps the best three words that made the world sit up and take notice of Rand.

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether than station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show"

And show they did.  In typical victorian elegance.  This fable is the favourite child of Dickens from among his many works and they say it is almost autobiographical.  Now how many hours would Dickens have suffered before conjuring this opening line?  Open to conjecture.  Even if he did suffer the writer's mental block his Micawberish hope ultimately prevailed and David Copperfield was born.

"The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst Railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly-gloved hand."

Ugh, pretty lengthy stuff.  But the tone is set for the rest of the work and already an eerie feeling of being watched by invisible eyes engulfs the reader.  H.G.Wells was, in the opinion of many, too ahead of his times.  His Invisible Man certainly was.  It is not exactly of the mystery/horror genre but the protagonist manages to evoke mixed reactions from the audience. He sure was the hero, at times invoking sympathy and at times hatred.  Some how, reading the work again, Johnny Depp comes to my mind.  His portrayal of a gangster in Public enemies  beautifully approximates the invisible man.

"It was a cold October morning in Paris and even colder for a man about to be executed by the firing squad"

You guessed it right.  The master of suspense's  famous first lines brilliantly sets the tempo for the rest of 300 pages of top-quality stuff.  The Day of the Jackal set the standards for what would eventually be called 'Forsyth' class.  Does it appear this opening line took two days for him to compose?  Not a chance.

So it all boils down to the opening lines.  And here I am, still in search of that elusive combination of first words that would persuade the reader to go right up to the last ones.  Yes, the last ones too do matter.  After all, who can forget "after all, tomorrow is another day?"

May be, I should log off and wait for another day for that stroke of inspiration.