Update, Openings, Sorcery and Cecelia

[sartorias]

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

Comments

[sartorias]

These are excellent examples.

Imagine how riveting that line of Dickens must have been when the book first started serializing!

[mrissa]

I think it's important to note that you did not have to be hooked with the very first line to keep reading. I think it's very easy for beginning writers to fixate on the perfect first line, and most of us will give a book a few paragraphs at least.

I need to care about somebody or something in the book within 50 pages. I read fast, so it's not a very big time investment, but if I'm thinking, "Well, maybe the heroine will die on the next page. Whatever," on page 50, I'm through. But page 5? If the writing isn't painful, I'll keep going at page 5 for no reason other than the book already being in my hands.

[sartorias]

I love that icon!

Yeah, if I am enjoying a book my "net" can be a hundred pages and more.

[mrissa]

I'm glad my sister-in-law took that picture. I tell people it's what I really look like.

Hooks

[dsgood]

A number of writers (some of them published) seem to be careful to put a hook in the first line of what they consider to be the story -- which is preceded by other material. A quotation from Volume 9 of A Brief History of Galactic Boredom, perhaps. Or an info-dump prolog.

On rec.arts.sf.composition, people can post short excerpts for critique -- preferably from the beginning of their stories. Responses to those critiques sometimes explain that this is all the stuff which needs to be established before the story begins.

[oyceter]

I generally don't pay that much attention to first lines or even nets -- mostly when I'm picking something up, I'm just hoping that there is no awkward writing, or obviously Mary Sue-ish characters, or the like, which will make me put the book down immediately.

But there was this one time I was debating if I should try reading Patricia McKillip's Winter Rose... I had read her before and somehow never been very taken with her, and I had read that book before and didn't remember much of it. But I was standing in the library, and I flipped it open to read: "They said later that he rode into the village on a horse the color of buttermilk, but I saw him walk out of the wood." And bam, I had to borrow that book and take it home (and subsequently fell in love with McKillip).

[sartorias]

If I'm enjoying the writing or the characters or some aspect of a book, the "net" can be a hundred pages or so, and I'm content, but like you, every once in a while a single sentence can just grab me.

[sartorias]

Hi, Doug--thanks for the kind words, and welcome! Going right over to add you now--

[sartorias]

I meant to say, if you're the Doug whose nifty work I read in Polyphony, well, this is great to find you here!