Without Beginning

. . . without beginning.  I like that.  From Ueland's book, If You Want to Write.  She passes over the term very quickly, and in mid-sentence.  She describes a friend of hers who will start telling a story without beginning:  " . . . never leading up to it with apologetic explanations, proofs and qualifying phrases."  The necessary information comes later, when she's caught her breath.  It has a Biblical ringtone to it -- without beginning, amen.

I think of another term, a Latin one -- in medias res -- in the middle of things.  To begin right in the middle of a story, in the thick of it, from where you are floundering or maybe even drowning -- do that first, then once you've survived, tell how you got there.  It's a technique employed by most oral traditions  -- The Odyssey, The Iliad, Nibelungenlied, The Kalevala, on and on.  These have been given the status of high literature, but really they're just good children's stories meant to grasp and keep the attention of rowdy men in the mead hall.  I think a Bruce Willis movie might employ the same technique. 

"Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the double egg,
but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things."
--(Horace, "The Art of Poetry," lines 147-148)

Maybe that's why I'm having a hard time going linear with this thing I'm pretending to write.  I instinctively want to start in the middle, plunge into it even if it feels like drowning, then fill in the rest later -- like a survivor shaking herself off.  Now . . . let me tell you how I got here . . .   

I think I'll go with my instincts for writing the middle portions first.  The order will find it's own way to correctness later -- like birds flocking to a spot on the wire.