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Welcome to the Tuesday Telegrams, a semimonthly newsletter from award-winning author Naseem Jamnia. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, where I update you on projects, offer behind-the-scenes looks, delve into craft, and other publishing and writing topics.

Before I get started...

The Glade is a finalist for the Ignyte Award!! And you can vote for it to win!

I am honored and delighted to announce that The Glade is a finalist for the Ignyte Award for Outstanding Middle Grade!

I could not believe the email when I received it. I was̉—and still am!—so delighted that my mushroom book has gotten some recognition!

Voting is available to everyone! That means if there was something speculative you loved on the ballot, you can vote for it! And if you'd like a PDF of The Glade to make your decision, just respond to this email and I'll send you one.

Voting ends on Sunday, August 16—my birthday!! Happy birthday to meeeee!

I saw an exchange on Bluesky the other day that got me thinking about "thesis statements" in fiction.

Matt Bell tweeted (or whatever the Bluesky equivalent is) that the Save the Cat screenplay format says a character should state the theme of the movie early. He tells his students that novels, too, can do this. Tobias S. Buckell chimed in that he says something similar for his students.

Bell and Buckell are both established, respected, award-winning authors, and I was interested to hear them pick this apart further. If you've been a student of mine, you know I deeply criticize the wielding of Western craft expectations against marginalized writers. So I asked them to talk more about it for exactly that—because marginalized writers tend to get called "didactic," and yet have work deeply misunderstood, so it might be a useful tool to have in the box. (Also, it would be easy to do this extremely poorly.)

Bell pointed to the opening line of Pride and Prejudice as a great ironic example: "It's a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." He said it "sets the table nicely."

Buckell said first lines or first paragraphs in classics tend to set up the story nicely. His example was 1984: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13." His description of this: "There's so much thesis in that first line of 1984, but it's done as narrative/description so it's very missable. But the clocks can't strike 13 unless the inanity of bureaucracy kicks in, and it wouldn't be all the clocks unless totalitarian..."

He gave two other first-line examples as well. From A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: "The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries.”

Buckell said the novel is about scale and this manhunt, and it's stated directly. "Scale" is such a good description, here, because the line also tells us something about the setting and genre expectations. The setting is one hundred light years across, so we know we're thinking about space; it takes eight centuries, so we know it's also about time. This must be a sci-fi of some sort, and on an epic level. We might not know what the manhunt is about yet, but we know it's important enough to warrant that investment of time, space, and resources—because the hunter(s) must have resources enough to justify that scale—and that the object of pursuit is wily enough to escape capture time and time again.

Buckell's last example was Mortal Engines by Philip Reeves: "It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

I admit that this gets me extremely curious as well: the personified locations-as-subjects, from the looming presence of a city as large and storied as London setting its sights on a small mining town, and the likely climate-changed future resulting in a dried and "old" North Sea. Who is calling the North Sea "old," as in, the North Sea of a past the narrator may know or remember? The mundanity of opening with the weather is also an interesting move, and I'd be curious to know the rest of the opening paragraph or page to feel it situated.

This is, then, sort of a conversation about first lines. I think we can be flexible here beyond a first sentence and think, instead, of a reader's immediate foray into a story.

What I have learned, as a person with works publicly available, is that you can have absolutely incredibly readers and also very, very bad ones. A stellar first line(s) will not help someone reading in bad faith understand your story. But it might help engage someone who will be a really great reader for your work if they give you a chance.

So I thought about the most perfect book ever written and its opening line: "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days."

This is the opening line for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. And when I read it to write this newsletter, I was so surprised at how much work this first line is doing.

Simply told, The Remains of the Day follows an English butler driving through the English countryside and reflecting on his career. But that's not what it's about. It's about a man reflecting on his life and wondering whether his service was to something greater than himself—a thing he's always believed—or whether there was more to the story that he allowed himself to believe.

There are other ways this line could have been written (ones that an LLM would probably "correct" to, but I digress...), such as: "I've decided to take the trip after all."

But that doesn't have the texture of the voice, does it? Let's look at it again: "It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days."

There is so much hesitation and reluctance in this sentence: "seems increasingly likely" "really will" "has been preoccupying." Stevens, it becomes obvious from the first few pages, is not a man of imagination; "for some days" belies the truth of what began his journey. He doesn't call it a vacation or a trip, but an expedition—a journey that needs preparing for, that will cause change, that might have an end goal.

I decided to then look at the opening line for the book that changed my writing forever, NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season: "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?"

I mean, woof!

We as readers are beginning with a story, and the opening line acknowledges that. But it's a beginning at an end, which sets up an immediate tension. We're being told a story ("let's start"), hinting at a narrator. And the "why don't we" is also a really important part of this opener because it hints at a speaker who is obfuscated and forgotten until nearly the end of the book.

The end of the world—yet it's not the end, is it? Because that's where we're starting, which means there is something after.

This first line stands on its own, but it then really changes when the second line is added: "Get it over with and move onto more interesting things."

Wait, I'm sorry—did you just say the end of the world wasn't interesting? That you're trying to rush through it? That there is something moving beyond the end?

But that is precisely the point of The Fifth Season—the world keeps ending, and it keeps beginning again. The question is: whose world? How many beginnings and endings will we undergo? And who is telling us this story from an undisclosed after?

I did think of a few of my own opening lines, though, and what they foreshadow about the book. I think The Bruising of Qilwa is maybe the closest to this: "In the early sun-swept hours of the morning, when purples and pinks smeared across the sky like blood, Firuz-e Safari looked for a job."

My intention, when I wrote this sentence, was to juxtapose the mundanity of the action (a job-hunt) with the blood imagery, given the role blood plays in the book. A better thesis might have said something (in so many words) about refugees and healthcare or histories of oppression and complicity, but that also would have implied a book that is on a much grander scale than Qilwa's slice of life.

Because at the end of the day, Qilwa is about a refugee trying to live their life in a city that makes it difficult. Work is the most grounding force in Firuz's life, despite the role of caregiving and magic and the mystery of the blood-bruising, but even work is shadowed by blood.

I don't know whether a "thesis statement," especially as a first line, is necessarily available to every story, every writer, and every writing tradition. But it definitely is something interesting to consider.

Exercise: Your "Thesis" Statement

Take a look at your work in progress. Is there a "thesis" in the open page that hints at the story's concerns and focuses? Where does it come in? Can it come up sooner?

Conference time! My first Readercon!

Anyone headed to ReaderCon this year? My schedule is now live! It's been a minute since I did an in-person conference, and I'm looking forward to it. Let me know if you're going to be in the Boston area July 9-12!

​Solidarity Corner​

If you have organizations, causes, or mutual aid requests you'd like me to spotlight here, please send those links my way. We get through these things when we do so together.

I've heard that Linktree is involved in some AI nonsense soon, so I'll be looking for another site to host the links or create a page on my website—just haven't gotten around to it yet.

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