The Hook
Here's the opening paragraph of The Dreaming Jewels (aka The Synthetic Man) by Theodore Sturgeon:
They caught the kid doing something disgusting under the bleachers at the high-school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years.
That's a hell of a hook. How could I not read more after reading that paragraph? Morbid curiosity compels me to read on. Who is this kid? What could an eight-year-old have been doing in secret for so long that was so disgusting? Well, it's not even close to what I thought (shame on me), but it is strange, and by the time I found out I was already three pages in and heading for the checkout line in the bookstore. The rest of the book was only pretty good... certainly not Sturgeon's best novel. (That would be More than Human, followed I suppose by Some of Your Blood.)
When I read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, I was about a hundred pages in before I knew I really wanted to finish the other five hundred. That first hundred was some hard slogging.
So. . . How long do give an author the chance to hook you? A few paragraphs? Pages? A chapter? A section? Do you read every book you start straight through to the end, even when you know it's a stinker? What opening hooked you right there in the bookstore?
What about movies? I generally know about ten or fifteen minutes in whether I'm interested in watching the rest, and without some peer recommendation I'm happy to turn off a rental when I'm not digging it.
They caught the kid doing something disgusting under the bleachers at the high-school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years.
That's a hell of a hook. How could I not read more after reading that paragraph? Morbid curiosity compels me to read on. Who is this kid? What could an eight-year-old have been doing in secret for so long that was so disgusting? Well, it's not even close to what I thought (shame on me), but it is strange, and by the time I found out I was already three pages in and heading for the checkout line in the bookstore. The rest of the book was only pretty good... certainly not Sturgeon's best novel. (That would be More than Human, followed I suppose by Some of Your Blood.)
When I read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, I was about a hundred pages in before I knew I really wanted to finish the other five hundred. That first hundred was some hard slogging.
So. . . How long do give an author the chance to hook you? A few paragraphs? Pages? A chapter? A section? Do you read every book you start straight through to the end, even when you know it's a stinker? What opening hooked you right there in the bookstore?
What about movies? I generally know about ten or fifteen minutes in whether I'm interested in watching the rest, and without some peer recommendation I'm happy to turn off a rental when I'm not digging it.