Opening paragraphs

[ElectricBlue]

But I have to give a close second to Salman Rushdie:

"I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. The time matters, too."

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy does much better than that. He has about a hundred pages describing Tristram's conception, and he's then not born until Volume Three. It's very long and involved, with many diversions, and involves grandfather clocks. As it would, written in 1759.

 

[AlinaX]

Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair starts: "My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the Chronoguard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle."

 

[BuckyDuckman]

Opening sentences and paragraphs fuck with me too much. I used to pick up compilations of short stories just to study opening lines.

As for my writing - I just want to get the opening over and get to the damn story.

Here's where the story starts - boom. Now, let's go - because I've got a lot more to say about what's happening.

 

[TadOverdon]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

 

[SimonDoom]

The Hunter Thompson quote is one of the best opening lines ever. Sets the tone immediately.

Some other good opening lines:

Call me Ishmael. Moby Dick.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Kafka, Metamorphosis

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Plath, The Bell Jar.

I am an invisible man. Ellison, Invisible Man.


One of the things they all have in common is that they're all weird, and therefore attention-grabbing. Each one leaves the reader with a question that needs answering.

 

[CyranoJ]

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy does much better than that. He has about a hundred pages describing Tristram's conception, and he's then not born until Volume Three. It's very long and involved, with many diversions, and involves grandfather clocks. As it would, written in 1759.

Not only one of my favorite books, Tristram Shandy also boasts one of the best-ever film adaptations of a book. It stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon and, in the true spirit of the originating material, digresses so much that it doesn't actually get past adapting the first few scenes of the book.

 

[AlexBailey]

—————

 

[TadOverdon]

The Hunter Thompson quote is one of the best opening lines ever. Sets the tone immediately.

Most of the paragraphs on the first page or two of Loathing contain what would be great openings.

The only thing that really worried me was the ether.

 

[gordo12]

I swapped the phrase "window embrasure" for "window sill."

If our fortress were the Lafierriere instead of vaguely inspired by it, of course, we couldn't add stairs.

There's no ledge outside Frank's window. And he's not going to escape.

If I go that far over the top in the first couple of hundred words, there's nowhere to go with the prose on page two when Janet fucks three guys. LOL

And here we're fretting over poor Frank's window sill.

Poor Frank. I hope there's danger pay for husbands appearing in your stories! Or at least a nice retirement home.

One teensy thought. A lot of readers here have focused immediately on location in the South Pacific. No Fortresses there. If you changed that to the South Seas it could be anywhere. Just a thought!

 

[TadOverdon]

Poor Frank. I hope there's danger pay for husbands appearing in your stories! Or at least a nice retirement home.

One teensy thought. A lot of readers here have focused immediately on location in the South Pacific. No Fortresses there.

My fictional hubbies seem to be made to suffer. It's their lot in life.

And there's no island called Kai'ulau within five hundred miles of the Marquesas or anywhere else, that I know of. I hope there isn't. One Googles incessantly and frantically over invented proper nouns - people, places, corporate entities...

Seriously, character names drive me up the wall. If I can find more than a dozen people on Google with the same name, I breathe a sigh of relief. Unless one of them is famous. Men's names are the worst - the number of them from every nation who have made professions of pushing or throwing or chasing balls around a court for long enough to have some little notoriety is staggering.

Chapter One: Sex and Drugs

To Frank Palmieri's wife, Janet, Kai'ulau was a South Pacific paradise that she never wanted to leave. To Frank, the island had become a nightmare from which he needed to escape.

First, he had to get out of the fortress.

Novak Global Traders had provided guest quarters for the couple in one tower of the old French fortress that served the Novak family as both home and business headquarters. There was a door opening out from their suite into a corridor which led to a long stair down to the great hall, and a window carved into the basalt outer wall of the bedroom, perhaps a hundred feet above a stone courtyard.

When he was sure that Janet was asleep, Frank crawled out into the deep window embrasure.

The late evening light offered him little help. He guessed that the window was a modern update to the edifice, created by enlarging a narrower opening - perhaps a loophole from which a rifleman could have fired into the courtyard below. The wall itself was about six feet thick up here, as much as twice that nearer its base.

Who had the nineteenth-century colonists meant to defend themselves against with this place? No one seemed to know, now. They'd built on Kai'ulau's highest coastal promontory, and the place commanded a clear view of the shore, less than a mile to the south, as well as of the narrow lagoon harbor entrance several miles east. But for all their determined defense preparations, no attack had ever come. Pyramids of rusted and mossy iron balls stood unused outside the walls beside cannon tumbled off their rotted wooden carriages. The invaders the French had feared must have deemed the island not worth the powder and passed it by. So had the rest of the outside world, since the beginnings of time.

Frank felt his way along in the close darkness until his fingers found the outer edge. Fighting vertigo, he stuck his head outside. In the gloom below he could just make out a narrow set of stairs cut into the outer face of the building. There was a landing below him. It was impossible to judge the drop in this light. It might be as little as fifteen feet but could be thirty. Twenty years ago, he might have risked the attempt. But pushing fifty, and thirty pounds overweight, he was not about to become an action hero tonight.

"Frank? Frank…where are you?"

He cursed under his breath. He should have known better. Over the last several days Janet had taken to sleeping restlessly and in short naps. When he backed into the bedroom he found her sitting gathered up in the middle of the carved rosewood bed with her chin on her knees, bedclothes pulled loosely up around her naked breasts.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to find a way out of here."

"What's wrong with the front door?"

 

[gordo12]

Chapter One: Sex and Drugs

To Frank Palmieri's wife, Janet, Kai'ulau was a South Pacific paradise that she never wanted to leave. To Frank, the island had become a trap from which he needed to escape.

First, he had to get out of the fortress.

Novak Global Traders had provided guest quarters for the couple in one tower of the old French fortress that served the Novak family as both home and business headquarters. There was a door opening out from their suite into a corridor which led to a long stair down to the great hall, and a window carved into the basalt outer wall of the bedroom, perhaps a hundred feet above a stone courtyard.

When he was sure that Janet was asleep, Frank crawled out into the deep window embrasure.

The late evening light offered him little help. He guessed that the window was a modern update to the edifice, created by enlarging a narrower opening - perhaps a loophole from which a rifleman could have fired into the courtyard below. The wall itself was about six feet thick up here, as much as twice that nearer its base.

Who had the nineteenth-century colonists meant to defend themselves against with this place? No one seemed to know, now. They'd built on Kai'ulau's highest coastal promontory, and the place commanded a clear view of the shore, less than a mile to the south, as well as of the narrow lagoon harbor entrance several miles east. But for all their determined defense preparations, no attack had ever come. Pyramids of rusted and mossy iron balls stood unused outside the walls beside cannon tumbled off their rotted wooden carriages. The invaders the French had feared must have deemed the island not worth the powder and passed it by. So had the rest of the outside world, since the beginnings of time.

Frank felt his way along in the close darkness until his fingers found the outer edge. Fighting vertigo, he stuck his head outside. In the gloom below he could just make out a narrow set of stairs cut into the outer face of the building. There was a landing below him. It was impossible to judge the drop in this light. It might be as little as fifteen feet but could be thirty. Twenty years ago, he might have risked the attempt. But pushing fifty, and thirty pounds overweight, he was not about to become an action hero tonight.

"Frank? Frank…where are you?"

He cursed under his breath. He should have known better. Over the last several days Janet had taken to sleeping restlessly and in short naps. When he backed into the bedroom he found her sitting gathered up in the middle of the carved rosewood bed with her chin on her knees, bedclothes pulled loosely up around her naked breasts.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to find a way out of here."

"What's wrong with the front door?"

I did a little light editing to remove some extraneous words and bring the two most important plot points a little closer together.

"Janet Palmieri's [edit] naked breasts..."

Now there's an opening line the guys will fall over themselves to read

LOL, just kidding. Your new chapter is much improved.

 

[TadOverdon]

I did a little light editing to remove some extraneous words and bring the two most important plot points a little closer together.

"Janet Palmieri's [edit] naked breasts..."

Now there's an opening line the guys will fall over themselves to read

LOL, just kidding. Your new chapter is much improved.

I took you seriously and spent five minutes poring over your quoted section looking for the differences. LOL

So yeah, I'm pushing five hundred words without a sexual reference and decided it was time to get Janet's boobs in there.

I've swapped out "trap" for "nightmare." "Paradise" is such a grandiosity, isn't it? I thought "nightmare" matched it better.

 

[gordo12]

...................

 

[8letters]

I too think the new version is much improved.

 

[TadOverdon]

I'm doing the final revision on the book, and finally putting this one to bed - for better or worse.

Sex and Drugs

"It's paradise," Janet Palmieri had said to her husband when they'd first arrived on Kai'ulau. At the time, Frank Palmieri had agreed. To the couple standing together on the broken tarmac of the little airfield in the faintly humid afternoon breeze, under a cloudless sky and white tropic sun, the remote island nation seemed an ideal getaway spot. Tranquil and completely private.

The Palmieris weren't vacationing. They'd come a great distance to do business at the invitation of Novak Global Traders. Still, Frank saw no reason that their fairly simple mission shouldn't allow them some time to relax and enjoy themselves. Away from the distractions of the outer world and the pressures of helping to run Blue Oasis, he might even persuade Janet to commit to rebuilding what remained of their marriage.

But Janet was enjoying herself far too much, and Kai'ulau had become a nightmare from which Frank was desperate to escape.

He sat this evening on the outer sill of their tower bedroom's tall, narrow window, surveying the landscape below. Their hosts had quartered them in the centuries-old structure that served the Novaks both as home and business headquarters. Locals called it the Hermitage. It had been erected ages ago by the French, using slave labor, for the use of their missionaries. The Novaks had been continually modernizing and extending the original buildings ever since just after the Second World War. The Palmeris were in the original building, built out of heavy basalt blocks and overlooking a sheer two hundred foot ocean cliff.

Janet was asleep. Frank hoped that she'd stay that way. Seemingly always in a state of restless excitement these days, she'd taken to resting in short, fitful naps. To get out of this place he'd have to leave her behind, to come back for her later—if she even wanted that, at all.

The fading orange twilight was no help to him. It looked like about twenty feet from the sill to the narrow strip of land that hugged the bottom of the tower directly below. It might be thirty. He could try the trick of tying bedsheets into a rope, but if he came up short and had to drop the last few feet his momentum might carry him over the crumbling lip of earth onto the surf-swept rocks far below.

If he didn't fall over the edge, he'd have to thread his way around to where the land opened out into a long enclosed courtyard. The French had built the place more like a fortress than like any religious retreat he'd ever heard of. It stood on the flat summit of Kai'ulau's highest coastal promontory, backed up against the cliffs and commanding a strategic a view of the narrow lagoon harbor entrance several miles to the east. The promontory was almost a small island on its own, accessible from the rest of the island by hundreds of stone steps winding down along the ridge of a narrow isthmus.

Those stairs were at the far end of the courtyard on the far side of the building from where a fifty-year-old, overweight business tycoon sat in a window and contemplated becoming an action hero tonight.

Frank sighed. The notion was preposterous.

"Frank? Frank…where are you?"

He cursed under his breath. When he backed into the bedroom he found her sitting gathered up in the middle of the carved rosewood bed with her chin on her knees, bedclothes pulled loosely up around her to not quite cover the soft points of her pale nipples.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to find a way out of here."

"What's wrong with the front door?"

 

[SamScribble]

Might have something to do with my Welsh blood, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Dylan Thomas.

One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.​

(The opening of 'A Child's Christmas in Wales'.)

 

[46n2]

Haha, “Necroposting”. Nice.

-In general. That opening paragraph is obviously plenty important. From my standpoint? You wanna example your tone there. You wanna show the reader right there what they can expect going forward. The sensibility and structure of what we’re fielding ahead with, as well as what’s to be expected of the narrative attached to those elements as we unearth them; the color we can view the rainbow with.

And you cannot play to every category when you do that. Ya gotta choose within the message and be legit with it.

Just fuckin know what yer after and own it.

Throw some bait in there. Chum it up. Whatever. Though not if it’s a more “romantic” endeavor (as yours appears to be). Draw the shape and form of whatever you’re due to be dealing with - and do not cheat the reader in doing so.

Fuck the “established” rules of navigation. Just show them the boat.

And be clever that way.


-For some reason this feels relevant to me: I noticed immediately within the first page or three of Shades of Grey, she was using a very general while personable, not all that flamboyant, narrative approach. Wasn’t too stiff either. It read, receptive. Open to some easy interpretation, while not all that desperate. It read “willing”, if not a little bit weary of the waiting for something substantial that might “arrive” a little less difficult than it had been before.

That’s not an accident.

She also used several indisputably on purpose easy words to understand - in the context of what that might mean later but had not meant to mean that early (only they obviously had, she was baiting the reader; in a much less threatening manner than the material might scare a potential reader away from).

I found that really clever. And no doubt the most essential reason that thing was succesful (as well as the timing of it all and several other lucky-to-land-upon happenings).

Not that I’m pointing that material out as any measure of excellence - I gave up on it when he had stalked her to the hardware store and a bunch of failed (in my opinion) usage there; I couldn’t take it seriously at that point, cuz it’s not a book for dudes to appreciate much, I suppose - rather go back to some Ayn Rand and a heated race along a track of brand new Reardon Steel. Ya know? Lots more to learn there. No so much the other thing.

So that’s what I would say.

Particularly in this field.

Example whut’s to cum. And how.


Now go get that done. It clearly does not agree with being buried ; )

 

[SimonDoom]

At a certain point it's a matter of taste and style and staying true to your own muse, so no one can advise you. My taste is just my taste. But the one thing that leaps out to me is that I would not put the opening paragraph of a story in the past perfect tense, ever. Just simple past tense. Get rid of the "hads."

 

[LAHomedog]

Different strokes for different folks. I think the opening has to have a hook. It doesn't matter what the hook is. (There are as many possibilities as great riffs in rock & roll), but for me? It has to have a hook.

My two cents.

 

[Dingo_Triplesix]

Seconding hook. I found this overview very helpful:

https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=...e%20Hook.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0Xvv4R4fNqKZ0_w7pa1sUg

Love
Dingo

 

[gordo12]

I used to call them twoxfour openings in the sales field. Something that shook them out of their complacency (like a 2x4 over the head) and got their attention.

But "hook" works too!

 

[8letters]

As I gave lots of feedback on TadOverdon's story opening, I'd thought I'd give them a chance to return the favor of the story I'm finishing up:

A Flirting Workshop With My Sister
There was a knock on my dorm room door. “Come in!” I hoped it wasn't who I thought it was.

“Hi, Eli!” said my freshman sister Z in a slightly higher than normal tone. I rolled my eyes and groaned inwardly before turning in my chair.

“Hi, Z,” I said with my voice full of annoyance. “What are you doing here?”

Z ignored me, instead offering her hand to Landon, the friend I was studying with. “I'm Z,” she said with friendliness turned up to ten. “Eli's little sister.” Landon stood up from my bed and shook her hand. Landon and I were both sophomores. Z leaned forward to Landon and said conspiratorially, “Mom has me check in with Eli regularly so he can keep an eye on me.”

“Hi! I'm...um...Landon. Landon Chu.” Landon was acting like a pretty girl had never introduced herself to him before. This was going to be bad.

Z looked at the book Landon had set on the bed. “Are you studying Organic Chemistry?” My sister chewed her gum as she waited for Landon's answer.

“Yes.”

Z tilted her head slightly as she looked at Landon. I knew exactly what she was going to say. “Is that the chemistry between males and females?” She had used that line before on my friends.

“Well, um, it...it could be.” Landon was totally flustered. I had warned Landon that my sister might drop by, and, if she did, she would flirt with him even though she had no interest in him. My warning did him no good. “I mean I guess it could be, but that's not what we're studying now.”

I said with a little heat. “We're studying. I have a lot of studying to do. What do you want?”

Z pretended to not hear me. She asked Landon, “Are you a pre-med major too?” She looked at him adoringly with her blue eyes wide as she chewed her gum and twirled some of her shoulder-length blond hair.

“Yes. Yes, I am.” Landon was probably the smartest guy I knew, and he sounded like his brain was mush.

“I could never be a pre-med major,” Z said as she twisted her body slightly back and forth. “I could never learn all the stuff you have to learn.” Z's movement drew Landon's attention to the writing on her t-shirt. It had the mathematical formula Distance Raptor, over a division bar, over Time Raptor, then an equal sign, then Veloci Raptor. The last two words were printed over a black velociraptor. Landon was quiet for a moment as he read the shirt.

Z said, “They're 34 C's.”

Landon said in a surprised tone, “What?”

“They're 34 C's. You were staring at my chest, so I thought you were trying to guess my bra size.”

Landon had a horrified look on his face. “No,” he said as he shook his head back and forth quickly. “No. I wasn't—”

“You thought they’re a different size?”

Landon was on the verge of panic. He almost shouted, “I was just reading your shirt!”

 

[stickygirl]

Might have something to do with my Welsh blood, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Dylan Thomas.

One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.​

(The opening of 'A Child's Christmas in Wales'.)

Oh that's lovely. I've recently fallen in love with his writing, but haven't read that yet.

I remember at school having to read and re-read the opening paragraph of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice because I found it so odd...
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Apparently it's supposed to be ironic.
It could translate to "If a dude's loaded, he gonna get laid."

 

[TadOverdon]

As I gave lots of feedback on TadOverdon's story opening, I'd thought I'd give them a chance to return the favor of the story I'm finishing up:

I'm hesitant to analyze others' work, however helpfully I might think I intend it, partly because my own prose is not notably awesome. And the posted excerpt is just fine as narration. It moves along, it's engaging and it's clear most of the time.

I like all the dialogue, which has a natural ring and brevity to it.

A few small things that could be different. I know they're probably just nitpicks:

There was a knock on my dorm room door. “Come in!” I hoped it wasn't who I thought it was.

Could be:

We were interrupted by a knock at my dorm room door. "Come in!" I hoped it wasn't who I thought it was.


Why? Maybe for the little bit of curiosity value (who's "we" and what were we doing?), but mostly because if I'm the narrator then Landon is there with me from the beginning of the story, but narratively he materializes after the intruding sister is introduced. The way it is now, is a kind of a quasi-third-person "periscope view" at the opening which widens out to include Landon at the point he's required by the narrative. It stopped me for moment, having initially imagined that "I" was alone with my annoying sister. Of course, Landon shows up all of four sentences in, so it's a minor difference at most.

“Hi, Z,” I said with my voice full of annoyance.

Could be:

"Hi, Z" I said, annoyed.

Or,

"Hi, Z." I was annoyed.

Reason is that the first-person narrator describes themself as a third-person observer might - this is how I sounded - rather than relating their experience - this was my feeling. I don't know where each version lands on the "show not tell" principle, but IMO the original is slightly distancing.

It had the mathematical formula Distance Raptor, over a division bar, over Time Raptor, then an equal sign, then Veloci Raptor. The last two words were printed over a black velociraptor.

This was the one thing that read to me as unclear. I already knew the joke, so I got it from the description. But I had to read it twice (maybe I skim too much).

I'm way too wordy, but I might write something like:

It was laid out like a math formula. The words "Distance Raptor" were printed above a division bar. Below the bar was "Time Raptor," then an equal sign below that, and finally the words "Veloci Raptor" below that as the solution. At the very bottom was a black silhouette of a dinosaur.

Maybe the original is clear enough to other readers, or mine is worse. Maybe it's just that "above" is clearer to me than "over," and I'm probably fussing at trivia. But that was the only confusion I had about the excerpt.

Thanks

(Okay, I know this one has the solution to the right of the equal sign rather than below it...)
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41eJ-5gDuWL.jpg

 

[LAHomedog]

Most of the paragraphs on the first page or two of Loathing contain what would be great openings.

Quite simply the fucker could write.