51–60 of 89 posts
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins
My extended family owns an old country house with loads of fiction books, a fair bit of it genre fiction from the 50s and 60s. We have a great game that we play when we go up there with friends, a bit like the Dictionary game / Balderdash . Everyone peruses the shelves a picks out a promising book. Then, one round at a time, someone gives the title of their book, reads the back, and maybe reads a few choice paragraph…
To me, Joseph Conrad will always be the best writer of openings. At times, they can be a bit too descriptive, but if you take your time, the atmosphere-building is worth it. He also frequently uses a layering technique, where the narrator reports someone or something else that contains the actual story. Heart of Darkness famously does this. I'll take this approach over an attention-grabbing line any day. Here's one o…
If you’re a fan of Conrad’s, and of audiobooks, I certainly hope you’ve listened to Kenneth Brannagh’s reading of Heart of Darkenss . It is excellent.
A lot of writing advice focusses on writing the perfect first line/page/chapter, because that's all editors/agents will read. And so I find many books have great openings, but get boring in 2nd chapter. So if Im in a store, I always start browsing a book after the 1st chapter-- that gives me a better idea of what the book will be like. And this advice-- open a book with a "killer" opening isnt always true. When I was…
A parallel with software would be shareware games. Often the first free chapter was the best the game would ever get. John Romero advocated for "finishing the first level last", in order to make it best. Music also felt like this for me (in games), e.g.: the opening themes to Doom, Tyrian, Raptor are very memorable.
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A parallel with software would be shareware games. Often the first free chapter was the best the game would ever get. John Romero advocated for "finishing the first level last", in order to make it best. Music also felt like this for me (in games), e.g.: the opening themes to Doom, Tyrian, Raptor are very memorable.
What I loved about Half-life demo-- it was a completely new level not in the original game--but it still had all the main things that made the game fun (aliens, marines, puzzles etc). For music -- I guess you do need a killer opening, as people will change the channel (or click away) (unless you are already very famous).
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Maybe it is from all the years I have spent trying to trim my overly verbose writing, but "was to remember" grates on me as a needlessly inflated way of saying "remembered."
The Spanish original is "había de recordar", and "was to remember" is a good translation. It's meaning is different from just "remembered", as it implies a causality. It wasn't a random remembrance that just happened, it was some memory that was brought by the proximity of death.
My comment was intended to decry the loss of my more literate and verbose pre-corporate self.
I'm surprised that the author of the article did not include the classic "It was a dark and stormy night" [1]. Granted it's probably a bad way to start a novel, but it's a famous and a catchy way to start a novel to get the reader's attention. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night
It's kinda amusing that this particular opening line is considered terrible in English literary tradition. I would argue that it's the rest of the sentence that makes it a terrible opening — it keeps going on about the weather while most people presumably would rather start reading about the main character and his actions at this point already, — but the line as quoted is perfectly fine on its own.
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It's kinda amusing that this particular opening line is considered terrible in English literary tradition. I would argue that it's the rest of the sentence that makes it a terrible opening — it keeps going on about the weather while most people presumably would rather start reading about the main character and his actions at this point already, — but the line as quoted is perfectly fine on its own.
Well, I don't know many stormy nights that are not dark... I am not a writer but usually, the idea is to limit repetition, especially in the opening line.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
> The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose.
Slaughterhouse-five
> All this happened, more or less.
The House of God
> Except for her sunglasses, Berry is naked.
Everything is Illuminated:
> It was March 18, 1971, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River.