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How to Write an Opening Sentence

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Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#61

Post by philh »

nagrom wrote: post #52
philh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, 1984 I think I've frequently heard this called a great opening line, and I've never worked out why. It doesn't tell me anything that I care about, it doesn't seem especially clever, and I don't notice myself having any other discernible emotional reaction to it. Can someone explain?

It sets the scene really well: "A bright, cold day in April" is evocative of exactly that. It's not pretentious and it immediately puts a setting in the readers mind. "and the clocks were striking thirteen." is an immediate juxtaposition of something non-intuitive. The first reaction is "Clocks don't strike thirteen! They strike a maximum of twelve!". It's just nonintuitive enough without necessarily being obviously…

My first reaction is more like "okay, so it's one o'clock". I never really noticed that it was weird before, though now it's pointed out I can see that it is.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#62

Post by ommunist »

Thank you. I worked for the tech magazine for a couple of years and can recall pretty much the same experiences. Which is strange, since language was not English. However that problems and solutions listed seems to be language-agnostic.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#63

Post by fhars »

mcguire wrote: post #56
koralatov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I'm not a great fan of his work, Banks did write one of the most memorable opening lines ever in The Crow Road . Two other great examples: William Gibson's Neuromancer : "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Herman Melville's Moby Dick : "Call me Ishmael." Neither strictly tells the reader what the books are about, but they're great hooks.

" William Gibson's Neuromancer: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.' " That is one of my favorite openers, too, but it has seemed weirdly anachronistic for a while. Does anyone under the age of 30 remember television static? Will anyone in Gibson's future?

We do still see static if we accidentally switch to the analog terrestial receiver built into our TV. And given the general quality of Samsung's software and UI engineering, that accident happens quite often.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#64

Post by munificent »

cynicalkane wrote: post #37
jonnathanson wrote: post #36

Most people stop reading something after the first few sentences. In that crucial 10 to 15 seconds, a book (or essay, or article, or blog post) has to make, and win, a subconscious appeal to your attention. Your reader's attention span is like a snotty doorman at a hot club. Your opening sentence needs to grab his interest and sneak the rest of the piece into the door. Consider the following examples from fiction: "I…

To my knowledge I don't know anyone who picks up novels, reads the first few sentences, then throws them away. Maybe people do this in airport bookstores, but I don't think Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Kafka wrote with the ADHD audience in mind. On the other hand I know that many readers hate to put a book down without giving it a fair shot. The "catchy opening" design pattern is present in a lot of art where the audienc…

Actually, I think Harry Potter has a pretty strong opener:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#65

Post by Angostura »

I was a journalist for 15 years on trade magazines, and not surprisingly journalist training pays a lot of attention to story leads.

One thing that the post neglects to say is: "it depends entirely on the type of article you are writing" a hard news story will have a different lead to a feature, column or colour piece.

Most traditional news stories are structured so that can be 'cut from the bottom' - get the salient facts into the first sentence and broaden out from there, so that if your piece gets cut for the sake of space, the sub knows that (s)he can safely cut the bottom paragraph first, then if more space is required, cut the paragraph before that, and that, so that if at the end of the day, your previous page 1 lead has been trimmed to a 1 sentence news in brief, the original opening sentence will still get the story told.

With the demise of paper, 'cutting from the bottom' isn't so relevant, but the same discipline still holds true when writing a story for the busy reader.

All that said How do you write the opening sentence? For a news story, or press release, my first editor gave me the best advice I ever received:

"Imagine you're walking into a pub to meet your friend and the story you're writing has just happened. Your friend is intelligent, inquisitive, but not necessarily an expert in your detailed field. You sit down, pick up your pint and say: "You'll never guess what - XXXXXXX"

That XXXX is your opening sentence.

... or at least it's the first draft. The exercise is good way of immediately revealing what your mind thinks are the most important elements or a sometimes very complex story.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#66

Post by pestaa »

Angostura wrote: post #65

I was a journalist for 15 years on trade magazines, and not surprisingly journalist training pays a lot of attention to story leads. One thing that the post neglects to say is: "it depends entirely on the type of article you are writing" a hard news story will have a different lead to a feature, column or colour piece. Most traditional news stories are structured so that can be 'cut from the bottom' - get the salient…

I love this comment for following its own advice. "Cut from the bottom," it is still very readable and gets the point across.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#67

Post by fastball »

philh wrote: post #61
nagrom wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sets the scene really well: "A bright, cold day in April" is evocative of exactly that. It's not pretentious and it immediately puts a setting in the readers mind. "and the clocks were striking thirteen." is an immediate juxtaposition of something non-intuitive. The first reaction is "Clocks don't strike thirteen! They strike a maximum of twelve!". It's just nonintuitive enough without necessarily being obviously…

My first reaction is more like "okay, so it's one o'clock". I never really noticed that it was weird before, though now it's pointed out I can see that it is.

I think this opening line works better for people that don't use 24 hour time (namely Americans).

That is interesting, because Orwell was British, and I am fairly certain that 24 hour time was adopted in Britain before 1948.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#69

Post by Mz »

philh wrote: post #48
jonnathanson wrote: post #36

Most people stop reading something after the first few sentences. In that crucial 10 to 15 seconds, a book (or essay, or article, or blog post) has to make, and win, a subconscious appeal to your attention. Your reader's attention span is like a snotty doorman at a hot club. Your opening sentence needs to grab his interest and sneak the rest of the piece into the door. Consider the following examples from fiction: "I…

> "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, 1984 I think I've frequently heard this called a great opening line, and I've never worked out why. It doesn't tell me anything that I care about, it doesn't seem especially clever, and I don't notice myself having any other discernible emotional reaction to it. Can someone explain?

In addition to the excellent points others have made, the description "bright cold day in April" is filled with strong contrast. April is usually a warm month or, at worst, cool. It isn't typically cold. Similarly, bright days tend to be more warm than not so sunny days. So it strongly evokes unusual weather, which has a long history of being associated with abnormal events of significance to humans.

This is part of why the weather is a popular topic and something modern humans have put substantial effort into predicting, broadcasting, etc. The opening line signals an atmosphere ripe for unusual, important events that you wouldn't typically expect. It is a means to suggest the calm before the storm without admitting directly that a storm is coming. It is the kind of thing which causes one to prick their ears up, a cross between curiosity and threat assessment.

Real life examples: The year Krakatoa exploded, there was enough ash in the air to cause an abnormally cold summer in Europe. (This cold summer led to a story writing club which resulted in the original "Frankenstein". It was too cold for normal outdoor summer activities.) The night of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, people were manic and still up after midnight when the quake finally hit. And stories of historical (pre modern weather prediction) weather disasters typically start with comments on the unusual atmosphere which weirded people out beforehand but failed to tell them exactly what was coming.

So I think the line evokes that sense of being on edge and expectant even though you aren't quite sure why because there is no explicit threat inherent in a bright cold day in April. Still, there is implicit threat of something coming that you can't quite put your finger on. When it was written, people were likely more in touch with the weather than a lot of people in developed countries today, so it would have been more strongly evocative for that audience.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#70

Post by pcrh »

psykotic wrote: post #59
jonnathanson wrote: post #36

Most people stop reading something after the first few sentences. In that crucial 10 to 15 seconds, a book (or essay, or article, or blog post) has to make, and win, a subconscious appeal to your attention. Your reader's attention span is like a snotty doorman at a hot club. Your opening sentence needs to grab his interest and sneak the rest of the piece into the door. Consider the following examples from fiction: "I…

Those opening sentences have a particular kind of urgency. By contrast, the equally memorable openings of Lolita and Moby Dick could never be called urgent, but they do instantly establish an unusual first-person narrator. What they all share is density. If instead you want to fill up the page with ink while wasting the time of your readers, you start your book like Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities.

For the curious:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

and

Call me Ishmael.

and

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

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