The function of the beginning of a story. You don’t have to get the opening right before you can make any progress. Different kinds of openings. Starting with exposition. Starting in medias res. The necessity of having a sense of an ending while writing. Judging when to stop. The importance of how the story lands, rather than where it ends. The role of tension in a story. The cliffhanger. Arousing the reader’s curiosity. The importance of pace and how to sustain it. Methods of interrogating your writing for tension and pace.

‘Each chapter needs a narrative function. If you can’t summarise the purpose of a chapter you would be wise to check that it really does have a function. The other way to interrogate your writing for pace and tension is to ask yourself: What does the reader want to know at the end of this chapter?’

Chapter three starts from the surprise I felt when I first read a Security Council resolution. What does it mean to begin a resolution by recalling, reiterating, reconfirming or recognizing previous resolutions? In order to make sense of such beginnings, I compare preambles of Security Council resolutions to prologues in theatre plays as well as to preambles in Babylonian codes. Acts of recalling, I argue, are radically different from the decision that follows. The decision constitutes a cutoff in time, a break with the past and a pointer to the future. Decisions, in other words, present a new beginning, a lack of continuity. To recall, reiterate, recognize or reaffirm is to do the opposite: to indicate that resolutions have begun well before they were adopted. In that sense, acts of recalling seek to fill the gap that is created by a beginning, not unlike prologues do. However, preambles to Security Council resolutions cannot escape the dialectics of repetition. They do not innocently present the past as it is, but rather retake it in light of what is to follow. This means they come with their own breaks and gaps, which are filled by yet further acts of repetition.

The focus of this chapter is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It focuses on Heidegger’s changing attitude toward Presocratic philosophy in works surrounding his involvement with the National Socialists during the Second World War. It is particularly concerned with the shifting temporalities of Presocratic philosophy in Heidegger’s thinking: from representing a rupturous, revolutionary force in his ‘Rektoratsrede’ of 1933, it becomes a long-lost, cyclical mode of thinking in his 1946 essay ‘The Saying of Anaximander’. The chapter examines the links between Heidegger’s articulations of this particular archaic era of philosophy and a contemporary discourse of responding to the National Socialists by means of the Presocratics both positively, in the work of critics like Antony M. Ludovici, and negatively, in the writings of Georges Bataille. Furthermore, it connects Heidegger’s attitude towards the significance of the Presocratics to Nietzsche’s writings about Greek philosophy both in The Birth of Tragedy and in other works of the same time, such as his unpublished tract Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.