Update, Openings, Sorcery and Cecelia
My reward over the past couple of days has been rereading Sorcery and Cecelia in preparation for reading The Grand Tour. I have also been thinking about openings. One of the things I wanted to do was take a look at a few books that others might have read and loved, to track hooks and nets: hook being the obvious one, some image, sentence, or idea that snatches you right into the story.
Hooks are tough, and they don’t always work, obviously. I recall talking this over with a friend a year or so back. We both pulled out books and read hooks to one another. Our tastes sometimes overlapped, but not as often as we’d expected-even in the same book. I remember her saying “Here’s one that simply has to grab you!” and reading the opening line of a mystery, which described vividly a dead woman floating down a river in the middle of a big city. I had to tell her that that was an instant turn-off for me, wuss that I am.
Over the years I’ve read essays by various great writers and critics who said that the opening line of Pride and Prejudice was a hook for them. It never was for me. P&P’s opening chapter (it’s only two and a half pages long) was a net. I love that term ‘net.’ The image I got from rysmiel’s nifty comment a couple of posts ago was of a net weaving itself around me, strand by strand, until one thread weaves them all together with a snap, pulling me into the world of the book. The strands of the net in P&P was the humorous exchange of the opening scene, Mrs. Bennet’s silliness countered by her husband’s jokes; the snap was the line in which he says that the mysterious Mr. Bingley might like her better than any of her five daughters.
Does anyone want to examine openings of specific books more closely? In case, here’s my take on Sorcery and Cecelia
This book netted me securely by the third page-its opening letter being about the same length as the opening chapter in P&P. When I first opened it, I was charmed to find an epistolary novel. How many of those had I seen outside of the nineteenth century ones? Not many. When I was thirteen, a friend and I wrote four of them, bang, bang, bang, bang, in code so no grownups would nose and make fun of them. They were all historical novels, the first sort of a generic Past (in which there are horses, swords, and our heroines get to have long hair and long dresses), the second set in the American Revolution, the third in the French Revolution, and the fourth during the 1660s somewhere in the Lowlands, where we figured we could create a tiny kingdom. Why did we set it then? One of the strongest draws were those mighty wigs people wore, wigs just begging for being fished up by heroines from the heads of villains. Hey, we were thirteen.
So here’s a letter novel, and the contract with the reader within the first paragraph offers humor, character, and a sunny alternate Regency England in which the Corn Laws do not exist, there are no children dying in mineshafts at age six, or relatives vanishing in Spitalfields, to reappear (had anyone known it) as the main ingredient of street-sellers’ pork pies. In other words, a romance, with humor, with character, all presented in lovely clothes.
The net spins securely around me, the snap being the lines at the top of page three And there may be more excitement to come. Sir Hilary Bedrick has just been named to the Royal College of Wizards . . .
Romance, humor, and magic! Netted! I’m out of this world and into that one-I cannot stop reading until I reach the end.
Hooks are tough, and they don’t always work, obviously. I recall talking this over with a friend a year or so back. We both pulled out books and read hooks to one another. Our tastes sometimes overlapped, but not as often as we’d expected-even in the same book. I remember her saying “Here’s one that simply has to grab you!” and reading the opening line of a mystery, which described vividly a dead woman floating down a river in the middle of a big city. I had to tell her that that was an instant turn-off for me, wuss that I am.
Over the years I’ve read essays by various great writers and critics who said that the opening line of Pride and Prejudice was a hook for them. It never was for me. P&P’s opening chapter (it’s only two and a half pages long) was a net. I love that term ‘net.’ The image I got from rysmiel’s nifty comment a couple of posts ago was of a net weaving itself around me, strand by strand, until one thread weaves them all together with a snap, pulling me into the world of the book. The strands of the net in P&P was the humorous exchange of the opening scene, Mrs. Bennet’s silliness countered by her husband’s jokes; the snap was the line in which he says that the mysterious Mr. Bingley might like her better than any of her five daughters.
Does anyone want to examine openings of specific books more closely? In case, here’s my take on Sorcery and Cecelia
This book netted me securely by the third page-its opening letter being about the same length as the opening chapter in P&P. When I first opened it, I was charmed to find an epistolary novel. How many of those had I seen outside of the nineteenth century ones? Not many. When I was thirteen, a friend and I wrote four of them, bang, bang, bang, bang, in code so no grownups would nose and make fun of them. They were all historical novels, the first sort of a generic Past (in which there are horses, swords, and our heroines get to have long hair and long dresses), the second set in the American Revolution, the third in the French Revolution, and the fourth during the 1660s somewhere in the Lowlands, where we figured we could create a tiny kingdom. Why did we set it then? One of the strongest draws were those mighty wigs people wore, wigs just begging for being fished up by heroines from the heads of villains. Hey, we were thirteen.
So here’s a letter novel, and the contract with the reader within the first paragraph offers humor, character, and a sunny alternate Regency England in which the Corn Laws do not exist, there are no children dying in mineshafts at age six, or relatives vanishing in Spitalfields, to reappear (had anyone known it) as the main ingredient of street-sellers’ pork pies. In other words, a romance, with humor, with character, all presented in lovely clothes.
The net spins securely around me, the snap being the lines at the top of page three And there may be more excitement to come. Sir Hilary Bedrick has just been named to the Royal College of Wizards . . .
Romance, humor, and magic! Netted! I’m out of this world and into that one-I cannot stop reading until I reach the end.