The Internet recommended everyone study Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
Everyone didn’t know it.
The Internet was astonished. “A metafictionist who has never heard of Calvino?”
Everyone grated at the term “metafictionist,” as if it were an accusation. Everyone did not write metafiction. Everyone was writing a blog novel that was not going as planned.
That, of course, was the problem. Everyone had had no plan--except success, and the latter had evaded her or him.
The Internet had warned everyone not to blog the novel--and certainly not to do so until everyone had finished the book. Everyone might want to make changes to earlier chapters, the Internet had advised, when she or he got to later ones.
The Internet had also told everyone that the surest way to know one’s beginning was to know one’s ending. The Internet had even advised starting at the end.
Everyone had not listened. This failure diminished everyone’s standing with the Internet. The Internet had once respected everyone; now the Internet thought everyone an idiot and gave her or him little of its time.
But today, the Internet was not very busy, so it allowed everyone’s inane queries.
“Let’s read Calvino’s book together,” the Internet proposed.
Everyone agreed.
Unfortunately, the Internet was unable to procure a free copy of the work for everyone, so the two agreed to review first sentences only.
“The book restarts ten times,” the Internet said, “each time introducing readers to a new novel and a new way to begin.”
Everyone had restarted forty-six times, and each and every start had been unsatisfactory. Multiple beginnings seemed like nothing worthy of praise, let alone examination. One good beginning was all any book demanded and all that everyone desired. But it seemed that no matter have many times everyone began again, everyone ended up with the same story.
“Let’s look at the first book recounted,” the Internet said, “which is to say the book itself. It starts with the word ‘You,’ automatically giving the reader a stake by making her or him the protagonist.”
“I hate second person,” everyone said. “Inevitably, that forces someone to be some middle-aged dad or mom, when it might well be a fifteen-year-old girl. Talk about off-putting.”
The Internet didn’t bother to mention that the “you” in this case was most certainly everyone her- or himself, for the book’s plot started with the reading of the book itself. Such an objection, the Internet knew by now, would have been pointless.
“The second chapter’s first sentence,” the Internet stated, before posing the next statement, “presents a set of images so absurd that they entice the reader further in as clouds attempt to block the passage.”
“Sounds intimidating,” everyone objected. “I find a familiar start more inviting, as if you were putting on an old jacket that you had as a child.”
“You used ‘you,’“ the Internet pointed out.
“I meant ‘you’ in a general generic sense,” everyone said.
“I think that’s Calvino’s intention also,” said the Internet, “at least at the start, until one becomes comfortable.”
“Fine,” everyone conceded, “the reader. As if the reader were putting on an old jacket.”
The Internet sighed. It had won the argument, but everyone would not give it the satisfaction.
The Internet skipped to the fourth chapter. “Here,” the Internet pointed out, “a first-person protagonist states that he or she is receiving dangerous statements, and naturally we as readers want to know what they are.”
“And from that, I’m supposed to learn what?” everyone asked.
“Don’t tell your readers everything straight off,” the Internet said. “Hint. Make the reader work a bit.”
“Nothing means anything without context,” everyone objected. “I want to know where I am.”
The Internet read the first sentence of the next chapter. “This chapter begins with context,” the Internet conceded.
“The author is writing about some kind of totalitarian society,” everyone surmised.
“Quite probably,” the Internet agreed, “but even with the military vehicles and the propaganda slogans on the wall, we’re left wondering what exactly is happening.”
Everyone grunted. “You can’t possibly tell readers everything in the first sentence. Just because something isn’t said doesn’t mean the reader will be curious.”
“Didn’t you find the first sentence engaging?” the Internet asked.
Everyone shrugged her or his shoulders. “Mildly,” everyone said. The Internet’s points were too general. Everyone wanted help with her or his start specifically--Calvino’s work seemed a distraction.
The Internet moved to the next section’s first sentence. “Shocking, isn’t it?” asked the Internet, pointing to the decapitated head.
“Gross is what it is,” said everyone. “Some people would drop it like a hand they’d scooped up in a vacuum cleaner.”
The Internet put down Calvino’s book. There was no pleasing everyone.
And that, of course, was what everyone had failed to see. There was no way to please everyone. Everyone could start 982 times, and still everyone would not want to read on. Everyone needed to be concerned not with what everyone wanted but with what someone wanted, one twelve-year-old boy in an attic skimming his parent’s old textbooks or one middle-aged professor of geography. Capture just one reader’s mind, and you have made the reader into the creator of another world for which everyone has furnished merely a beginning.
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