Workshop — First Sentences with Jay Nicorvo

Starting sentences with “It is…” (or was, etc)

1. Only add a third word — “It was television.”
2. Stretch it out, less than ten words — “It was television, pure and simple, without dispute.”
3. Let it ramble — “It was television, pure and simple, without dispute, and though some may dispute that, I maintain that it stands still as the platonic ideal, a metonym for all shows that come after, the Ur-show that took a genre, a medium, a generation away from tenuous explorations and shoved it without remorse into the world we inhabit today, and one might wonder, should such a thing not have happened, how unfortunate and insipid our lives-in-entertainment might be today.”
4. Now replace that sentence without “It is” to be more evocative — “Television, pure and simple, without dispute. There’s no way that we can take what we had from that show and say anything but. I maintain that it still stands as the platonic ideal, a metonym for all shows that came after. It was the Ur-show that took a genre, a medium, a generation away from the tenuous explorations and shoved, without remorse into the world we inhabit today. And one might wonder, should such a thing not have happened, how unfortunate and insipid our lives-in-entertainment might be today.”

It sets up a mystery that leaves the reader (and even the writer) questioning what it actually is that we’re talking about. I like the circumlocution aspect of it, talking about an unknown (unknowable?) thing.