A different start

[lc69hunter]

I am working on a 750 word story that starts with a quote from Robert Heinlein in the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", about moral philosophers and infidelity. It is going to cover some topics that I have covered before, about infidelity and will be published in Essays, due to the fact there is no overt sex and story line.

Has anybody else opened a story with a quote, like that, and what was the response?

 

[gunhilltrain]

I am working on a 750 word story that starts with a quote from Robert Heinlein in the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", about moral philosophers and infidelity. It is going to cover some topics that I have covered before, about infidelity and will be published in Essays, due to the fact there is no overt sex and story line.

Has anybody else opened a story with a quote, like that, and what was the response?

I have, but you probably want to keep it short, like just one line. I'm not going to get into another one of those copyright discussions (there is one every month here I think) but brief excepts seem to be okay. Anyway, my submission was an essay, and no one noticed the quote it but got a decent score from all ten people who voted on it.

https://classic.literotica.com/s/the-past-is-a-foreign-country

 

[SimonDoom]

I started one story, Planet of the Tentacons, with two quotes. One was from Paradise Lost, and one was from Dave Barry's Peter and the Starcatchers. The quote from the latter was "The mollusks -- generous hosts when they weren't trying to kill you."

At the time it seemed appropriate for an alien tentacle sex story. As far as I can tell, it had no impact on the reception of the story.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I started Loss Function with two quotes:

All models are wrong, but some models are useful. – George Box.

A loss function is a way of describing the gap between what we want and what we have. – Patricia Rosewood, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: Collected Course Notes", 2027.

The first is real, give or take some liberties in paraphrasing. The second one is obviously fictional, with Patricia Rosewood being the narrator of the rest of the story.

I wanted to ground that story in RL "AI" tech as much as possible. The Box quote is central to any understanding of machine-learning technology, and also a summary of the plot of my story. I also needed my readers to understand the concept of a loss function (if only for the sake of some word-play in the title), and I couldn't find a pithy quotable definition for that, so I wrote one and put it in the mouth of my narrator.

 

[MrHereWriting]

Has anybody else opened a story with a quote, like that, and what was the response?

When I did this, the response I received was similar to Ralphie's.