A Fractal Opening

The first chapter of Toni Morrison's Beloved thrusts us into a situation that stems from of the traumatic pasts of its characters. The house is spiteful, the ghost is busy, Sethe is seething with memories of Sweet Home and the past. We are introduced to the fact that the ghost, Beloved, had her throat slit at age two; to the barter Sethe made, trading sex for an engraved headstone; to the theft of Sethe’s milk by white boys at the plantation; to the dangling of other boys from sycamore trees. You could argue, Morrison has told her story in its entirely in the first dozen pages, but this is just a microcosm, an overture, a fractal that will unfold into large, richer, more detailed iterations as the novel unspools. Crucially, the opening does not defuse but creates suspense. We want to know more, to understand the underpinning of these intolerable moments more fully, to learn exactly what Sethe has survived, and how.

Prompt: Try it out on your own narrative. It may not be the right move for every story to tell so many details of the narrative up front — Beloved is a book built on fractals, so it fits, there — but even if you aren't using fractal structure, foreshadowing can be crucial. What slivers of your later story and imagery can you lard into your opening? And regardless of whether you rewrite your opening based on this prompt, consider asking yourself, as an exercise to assess the crucial plot points and themes of your project, what you would include, if you were to build your story fractally.