How to Write an Opening Sentence • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#81

Post by calinet6 » Wed, Jan 16, 2013, 10:04 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #38

calinet6 wrote: post #5

The first thing I did was apply this recursively to the article itself. "When I was a 25-year-old Senior Editor of The Mother Earth News, I did a lot of rewrite editing." Not bad! Started with an anecdote that got me interested. And it worked—I was interested enough to continue reading. Great article with some excellent writing suggestions for anyone.

Given the title of the link, I approached the article with intent. I answered the question "What does the opening line do for me?" before continuing. Here are my results: * It is straight forward and obviously relates to the title, giving me the impression "An article about writing by someone who may actually know about it". * It piqued my curiosity: "Is 25 young to be doing this job?" "I bet this was formative... ho…

Ha! I didn't even consider my opening sentence. Thanks for noticing, I guess?

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#82

Post by psykotic » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 4:30 AM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #80

psykotic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

Dickens wrote many great sentences by my reckoning, but that one has always annoyed me. It is a workaday piece of prose that long overstays its welcome, finally admitting its own irrelevance to this or any other book. That punch line witticism is an insufficient excuse for its pride of place as a starting sentence.

Re: How to Write an Opening Sentence

#83

Post by qu4z-2 » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 5:30 AM UTC

greatzebu wrote: post #32

rhblake wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the Gibson one. Another classic opening line, one of the few that I can still quote verbatim, is from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude : "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The Gibson opening line is great, but it's been a long time since it was common to see dull grey static on dead channels. Now, the color of a dead channel is bright electric blue. I wonder if in the future Neuromancer will need footnotes to explain the imagery, like Shakespeare editions that explain that "quick" used to mean "pregnant".

Gibson mentions this in the Foreword of the more recent edition I have.

What a different setting it evokes.