In Notes From a Small Country Bryson starts
Quote:
There are certain idiosyncratic notions that you quietly come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. One is that British summers used to be longer and sunnier. Another is that the England soccer team shouldn't have any trouble with Norway. A third is the idea that Britain is a big place. This last is easily the most intractable.
If you mention in a pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance most Americans would happily go to get a taco...
He immediately introduces his subject here. We know what the book is about and what it will be like. There is no conflict, there will be no character change. I noticed that Bryson's books flow very easily but at the same time, especially as a reporter of what happens not not a novelist, he takes what is funny and strings it together. Those transition sentences help a lot like here "This last is easily the most intractable." It doesn't really matter if it's the lst intractable or not, it's just something he needs to put in there so it flows, and it is easy to get lost as the reader in good stories even if they shouldn't flow together.
It's also interesting he doesn't start out IN TIME here. This isn't, "one time i said this," he says, "IF YOU MENTION"... this will happen, and IMO these are quite distinct choices.
Then four pages later he says "astounded to realize that i was closer to Cherbourg than i was to London... All this is a roundabout way of explaining how it was that I came to be standing... at Calais... I had come to Calais because I was about to embark on a grand tour of Britain and wanted to reenter the country as I had first seen it..."
IMO here he introduces his book and then has it flow into his story just by putting that silly transition sentence in there but it works. It's interesting he has his long introduction that isn't part of the story, then five pages in gets in time in the story and sneaks in his explination for why he is doing this cause it is not important to his book so it's just one paragraph five pages in.
Then, "I murmured and immediately fell into one of those reveries that are traditionally depicted on television by bringing up the music and making the screen go wavy. I was remembering my first sight of England more than twenty years before..."
Again a simple transition sentence to link stuff that really has no business being linked together. The next ten pages is all the story of him in England twenty years ago and it shows England more. Then the first chapter ends and he goes into the second chapter and picks up the story in time, in the current, and goes with it from there.
