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How to Write an Opening Sentence

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Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#71

Post by pcrh »

fastball wrote: post #67
philh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 24 hour clock is still not universally adopted in the UK. No English speaker says says "thirteen O'Clock" the way one might say "treize heures". English speakers might say "thirteen hundred hours", but only in restricted circumstances (e.g. in the military).

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#72

Post by unimpressive »

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?

>Does anyone under the age of 30 remember television static?

I do. In fact I've seen it in the past 24 hours. I want to at some point hook up a microcontroller to an old TV with a coax cable and subtly manipulate the static until a shadow person emerges from the spotty mist. I figure it would make a cool demo. [0]

>Will anyone in Gibson's future?

Probably not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_people

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#73

Post by Hello71 »

pestaa wrote: post #66
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.

Except for the first sentence which has little to no relevance with the advice per se.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#74

Post by gbog »

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…

This 'cut from the bottom' structure is maybe necessary but really fatiguing.

When I was learning Chinese, we had to read such news articles. When you have to analyze it word by word, it becomes evident that the authors is just diluting the sauce, adding more water every paragraph.

Maybe it is one of the reason for journalism to be a living dead. Interesting writings, the ones that hook their readship, are just the opposite: the more you read, the deeper you are immerged in the story (for fiction), the more you understand and discover (for non-fiction).

BTW: Just checked a bit pg's papers: they are not 'cut from the bottom', not at all.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#75

Post by ctdonath »

hdctambien wrote: post #42
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…

Also consider: "It was a dark and stormy night" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C9p9mw62qB8/TsWPk2-GMcI/AAAAAAAACF...

Oh, you MUST visit http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#76

Post by nnq »

How do you write an opening sentence that makes me keep reading the next few sentences, really?

Microscopic attention span - that's what will characterize most online readers if you're writing something online. In this context, any thought of "literary value/quality" is useless. As opposed to the OP, most are writing for maybe readers that have not real intention whatsoever to keep on reading. I know people that when they see an email longer than 5 lines of text on their display from someone unknown, they just throw it away without bothering to read it at all!

The questions I'd like answered are:

- How can you write an opening sentence that the reader's semi-conscious mind decodes even before he decides to keep on reading or not (with a 90% probability of the second outcome), and makes him change his mind and keep reading instead?

- Should I just add a "TL;DR" section on top of every long article I write because most people will not read it anyway, and hopefully at least this short message will get across? Or will this be a spoiler and make all readers just scan the "TL;DR" and nobody will read the full article now?

- How to prevent the "scan to see how long it is and decide not to read it if its too long regardless of title or content" way of thinking of a larger and larger portion of the population (and not necessarily the most ignorant: a very smart person told me that we won't read something longer than a paragraph because "if you can't summarize it in a couple short sentences, the I'll assume you don't know enough about what you are writing for me to worth investing the time and attention to read it") So then, are we all condemned to write only "elevator pitches"?

- Will overdoing it by using interesting "reader engagement tactics" just make the reader believe that I'm actually trying to sell them something and stop reading because of this assumption?

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#77

Post by Angostura »

Hello71 wrote: post #73
pestaa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except for the first sentence which has little to no relevance with the advice per se.

Exactly. But hey - I wasn't writing a news story.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#78

Post by Angostura »

gbog wrote: post #74
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…

This 'cut from the bottom' structure is maybe necessary but really fatiguing. When I was learning Chinese, we had to read such news articles. When you have to analyze it word by word, it becomes evident that the authors is just diluting the sauce, adding more water every paragraph. Maybe it is one of the reason for journalism to be a living dead. Interesting writings, the ones that hook their readship, are just the o…

I don;t understand why you think it's fatiguing. With a news story, the idea is that you should only have to read the first sentence to get the gist and to decide whether you want to read further.

Each subsequent sentence adds further detail, with the most salient facts always coming first. So you stop reading when you have as much detail as you want, safe in the knowleddge you're not missing anything too important.

If the author is diluting, simply repeating things already written at greater length they're not doing it correctly.

Just to reiterate, PG's articles aren't news stories so there is no need to follow this pattern. There are many other kinds of journalistic leads - the colour intro, the delayed drop, etc.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#79

Post by jonnathanson »

kafkaesque wrote: post #43
jonnathanson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Browsing is (was?) incredibly common in the bookstore era, and will become even more so in the modern era and beyond. Especially as digital sampling becomes more prevalent, and…

I think most novelists write with the intent to be read after they have some years of experience. It's the next, natural step. Whether that reader is at a publishing house or not is a little hard to know, especially in Kafka's case. From what I've read and studied at university, Kafka wrote for his friends a lot. He shared his writings with them and they had a laugh. His pieces were known (by his friends) as dark com…

"Kafka doubted many times that his novels and stories would ever be published because of their 'immoral' content. So, I'm interested in any further info you have that might suggest otherwise."

To be frank, the subject of Kafka's authorly intent or personal inclinations is a bit tangential to my original point, and I'm not sure how we arrived here. I can tell, by your username, that Kafka is a subject of great personal interest. I share a love of his work, though I do not have any particularly privileged or scholarly insight into his history. I simply brought his name up because he wrote a great opening line to a great work, and because he wrote in an era in which readers' attention spans were every bit as precious as they are today.

I think my original point has been sidetracked: namely, that great opening sentences capture the reader's attention, and that the reader's attention is at a premium. That's the only point I ever set out to make in this thread. And I think the point remains valid.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#80

Post by jonnathanson »

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.

The old joke about Dickens is that he got paid by the word, and he wrote accordingly. (There's probably some truth to it; he did serialize many of his novels, and was paid by the word for them. But he was paid very handsomely, and was considered something like his day's equivalent of John Grisham or Stephen King. It's doubtful he was seriously trying to nickel and dime his publishers by being verbose).

That said, I quite enjoy that opening line. It's satirical and snarky, and it plays on the sort of common hyperbole that's still very prevalent in today's society.

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