How Charlotte McConaghy successfully breaks writing rules in the opening of Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore is a tightly plotted page-turner of a novel – I’ll show you exactly how it works in a later post on the structure – while also being a moving and complex meditation on life, death, love, and nature. McConaghy is also a master stylist, and the beauty and interest of the prose is another attraction of the book.

It’s the prose, the sentence-level writing, I want to focus on in this post about the opening of the novel. The first chapter is very short. Let’s walk through it, sentence by sentence, to see how it works.

Here’s the first clause, not even the full first sentence! 

So we know we have a first-person narrator, we know instinctively that parenting is going to be an important theme of the novel (otherwise it wouldn’t get such important real state as the first sentence of the book), and we have our first story question: Why does our narrator hate her mother? 

Here’s the rest of the sentence:

The “but” is the hinge of the sentence leading to that surprising second clause. You might not have been sure of where that first clause was going, but you likely didn’t predict this direction. Placing the verb “drown” at the end of the sentence focuses the surprise there and balances the dramatic punch of the “hated” at the beginning of the sentence.

Those verbs – their specificity and power – give the sentence its force. Compare, for example, this watered-down version:

I don’t like my mother, but I think of her when things get difficult.

Without “hate” and “drown,” without the specific image of the mother’s face, the sentence is colorless and boring.

As it happens, the narrator does not drown, but the not-drowning is elided by a section break, after which McConaghy picks up the face detail she’s established in the first sentence: 

Notice the rhythm here. McConaghy could have positioned the descriptive details about the face in the first sentence, but it would have disrupted the resonant parallelism of the two consecutive clauses:

Compare this:

it is her face I see as I drown

the rough, wind-bitten, scratchy face I see when I wake

The author also gives us time to absorb the drama of the near drowning before opening a new story question: Who does this different face belong to? The three adjectives – “rough and wind-bitten and scratchy” – are given extra space to breathe with those ands in place of commas. Is this a man’s face, we wonder?

That question is answered in the next sentence:

As a copyeditor, my radar always pings when I see a word like “it” – could it be replaced with something sharper, more concrete and specific? Likewise, I will often suggest cutting a word like “looking” since if we are in deep point of view, as we are here, readers already know the narrator is doing the looking. Here’s what a trimmed version would look like: 

When the sudden arrival of pain overcomes me, I know the image of him will forever be as one with this pain.

Why didn’t McConaghy make this edit? What work do those seemingly trimmable words do? First, the original version keeps us focused on the face, which is the referent of both “it” and “what.” Second, the original hammers home that we are in present tense by including three extra verbs when compared to the trimmed version – “is,” “am,” and “look,” in gerund form. Third, it once again stretches out the moment so we almost viscerally experience the brief pause between the narrator seeing the face and feeling the pain. It takes a few seconds more to read “It is what I’m looking at” than to read the single word “when”.

And here are the remaining lines of the brief first chapter:

Notice how the “face” is still the focus, getting the starring subject position in the next two sentences. By the end of the chapter, the face is a complex metaphor, connected to both life (“a return”) and death (“a drowning”), and to both love (“forever be as one,” “bursting pressure in my chest”) and hate (the initial image of her mother’s face).

Take note, too, of how the verbs pull us forward into the future, into the story to come: “Whenever I see… I will remember… I will feel… the sensation will be so vivid…” The verbs that viscerally describe the narrator’s physical sensations are all in past tense (“dragged,” “flayed”) or in gerund form as adjectives (“burning,” “bursting,” “drowning”).

The core event the author opens with is quite dramatic, with life-and-death stakes: A woman nearly drowns and is found, or rescued, by a man she doesn’t know. But McConaghy doesn’t rely on the inherent drama of the event to pull us into the story. She adds another layer of metaphorical and thematic detail that prepares us for the complexity of the story she wants to tell.

I asked an AI tool to write a similar scene, using the following prompt: “Write a short scene in which a woman almost drowns in the ocean; she loses consciousness and when she wakes up she sees the face of a man she doesn’t recognize. Please write the scene in first person, present tense.” Here’s what it delivered:

Technically, it’s quite accomplished – we have deep POV, with specific details and strong verbs. In some ways it seems like it should be more compelling than McConaghy’s scene because it shows us what it feels like to drown. It even strikes a similar thematic note by connecting the man, via his eye color, to the “indifferent” sea. 

But we don’t get the sense of the narrator as a character with strong emotions, a mysterious past, and an even more mysterious future with a man whose face she will associate with life, death, love, pain.

Perhaps most important, the writing is generic and predictable. These sentences never surprise us the way McConaghy’s do; they don’t play with rhythm and tense; they don’t violate conventional writing wisdom in successful ways; they don’t provide unexpected juxtapositions for us to ponder. They don’t wake us up.