For a moment the waters of Eryth Mmorg were lit, roiling and churning as though a great knife had plunged deep into the pool’s murky heart.(...)
Behind him lay the flat, barren rock that was Taag’s Peak.
Quite a few of LE Modesitt's Recluce books begin with long periods where the main character is just going about their life. Making furniture, or whatever. He writes it in such a way that I care what is happening. I want the guy to make a good cupboard for Mrs Miggins down the road because I've been made to want him to succeed. In fact it often feels a bit disappointing when the story kicks off, I get so invested in the mundane life.
I have zero rules, because I give no chance on a book if it annoys me in any way. Seems boring? Don't care for the character? Slowing down in unexciting ways? Too thick on the cliche? Too one dimentional? DNF.This.
That happens in the first page, or right into the last few chapters, or right in the middle. For a variety of reasons.
The Background: So, on AbsoluteWrite, they have a thread to submit your first three sentences to see if people would keep reading. I've submitted a few selections just to see, and it seems that very few people there find my style of starting a book to be engaging, some even saying that all I'm doing is description.
Her name is Yuri. It's a boy's name, but she loves it. It was given to her by the man.
Iain Hund, former supernatural homicide detective, now mere magical vandalism inspector, feels the staleness of his car's air like a strangling hand upon his thoughts. He sends a last baleful glare at the wall he has pointlessly stalked for the past eight hours and starts his car to drive back to the station.
Stuffiness is a feature of long stake-outs, he's used to it; but somehow knowing you're sacrificing so many hours of your ever-shortening-life not to catch a murderer but a vandal whose only offence is to paint fine magical art on the city walls has a way of speeding the apparition of glumness.
Her name is Yuri. It's a boy's name, but she loves it.
It was given to her by the man. The first thing she owned that no one could take away, and the first man Yuri had met with more ability than her.
He'd taken her off the streets, cared for her, taught her to rein in her powers, and lots of new skills.
He'd turned her world upside down.
Your imagination is your limit Yuri, he'd say, if you want a necklace of water, make it so, if you want the drops to fall to the sky, make their up into down! And he was right.
"Edith!" said Margaret, gently, "Edith!"
But, as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street, looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield
Park is let at last?"
The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river. It didn’t occur to her to look back. Nothing in her experience ever gave her reason to doubt the shelter and those within it would be there when she returned.
A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by a woman of the Clan, people very different from her own kind. To them, blond, blue-eyed Ayla looks peculiar and ugly--she is one of the Others, those who have moved into their ancient homeland; but Iza cannot leave the girl to die and takes her with them. Iza and Creb, the old Mog-ur, grow to love her, and as Ayla learns the ways of the Clan and Iza's way of healing, most come to accept her. But the brutal and proud youth who is destined to become their next leader sees her differences as a threat to his authority. He develops a deep and abiding hatred for the strange girl of the Others who lives in their midst, and is determined to get his revenge.
Grass!
Millions of square miles of it; numberless wind-whipped tsunamis of grass, a thousand sun-lulled caribbeans of grass, a hundred rippling oceans, every ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise, multicolored as rainbows, the colors shivering over the prairies in stripes and blotches, the grasses — some high, some low, some feathered, some straight — making their own geography as they grow. There are grass hills where the great plumes tower in masses the height of ten tall men; grass valleys where the turf is like moss, soft under the feet, where maidens pillow their heads thinking of their lovers, where husbands lie down and think of their mistresses; grass groves where old men and women sit quiet at the end of the day, dreaming of things that might have been, perhaps once were.
Commoners all, of course. No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.
Will Graham sat Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea.
Jack Crawford looked at the pleasant old house, salt-silvered wood in the clear light. "I should have caught you in Marathon when you got off work," he said.
A few neighbors drove by, looking at the house quickly and looking away. A murder house is ugly to the neighbors, like the face of someone who betrayed them. Only outsiders and children stare.
Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.
Beginnings are important to hook readers? Absolutely, but they're also about introducing characters, settings and more importantly, situations and stakes. So if in media res is getting in the way instead of helping this, then it either needs to go or be adjusted.
I can't talk about your specific piece, but let's use Red Dragon as a medium between us.
The first chapter has Will Graham drinking with Crawford at his beach house. They talk a little, then about the case. Will doesn't want to go, but they need him. Then he talks to Molly about it.
Only on chapter 2 he goes to the crime scene and we have those awesome descriptions.
Is chapter 1 really exhilarating, jumping-out-of-chair chapter? I would say no, but what exactly happens at chapter 1?
There are three characters (Will, Crawford and Molly) that we learn about. The setting helps to learn about Will's mental health too. There's a situation (the murders), a dilemma (to go or not) and choices/stakes (go to avoid more innocent deaths with the risk of alienating your family and risk to yourself).
And these doesn't apply to only Will. Molly has to put up with that. Crawford comes to convince his scarred friend to leave his good life.
So it's not in the middle of the action, but there's a lot shown and being implied.
What if Red Dragon opened with chapter 2? With Will in the Leeds' house? Right at the action, investigating and thinking, etc.
What would we know about him (and the other two)? Would it have the same effect if he just got a phone call from Molly a chapter later and thought about she and the kid? If we only learned how Crawford got Will back much later?
Or did chapter 1 also helped the others to flow more smoothly and not interrupt the case with these things and risk meandering in various directions?
About description, right on the first chapter there are some, even a little info dumpey, but well portrayed, like Will saying to Molly that Crawford was his long time boss and partner ("Well, didn't you know..."), or him describing how hard it is to catch a serial killer (when she doesn't care or like his job), and while it's information and description, also serves as Will trying to make her understand how hard the situation is and why they need him.
The smell is pungent. Rank.
The darkest side of organic, decay brought on by violence.
If you are brave, and venture in the world's wilderness, you can cross the Wolf's path and marvel at his tall shoulder, his golden eyes, and the thickness of his pelt. But the Wolf of tales is no simple Canis Lupus.
He is the loss of innocence, the end at the end of all roads, night after day, death after birth, he is the moment of change in the cycles of life.
The Background: So, on AbsoluteWrite, they have a thread to submit your first three sentences to see if people would keep reading. I've submitted a few selections just to see, and it seems that very few people there find my style of starting a book to be engaging, some even saying that all I'm doing is description.
It got me thinking, in conjunction with the Slow Starts thread here, how long does the average reader give a book? I grew up with Robert Jordan, Tad Williams, Stephen R. Donaldson, Tolkein, etc. and most of those authors paint the scene initially. There's no hook like many of the modern books, and I feel that that's how I write as well. I set the scene, and gradually lead into the characters, and let the story unfold at a slower pace. But, is that too slow now?
A few people were gushing recently on The Shadow of What Was Lost, and when I opened it, on the first page there was :QuoteFor a moment the waters of Eryth Mmorg were lit, roiling and churning as though a great knife had plunged deep into the pool’s murky heart.(...)QuoteBehind him lay the flat, barren rock that was Taag’s Peak.
And my brain immediately froze, and went to this :(http://english.bouletcorp.com/files/2013/10/EN-Fantasy01.png)
The book he's reading is Bakker's The Darkness that Comes Before. I remember at least three of the names. (Plot differs a lot, though.);D ;D ;D
Unfortunately, he replied in a less than pleasing fashion, and it took everything in my soul to not rate his book 1 star. Had I not been an author I'm sure I would have.
I think patience has nothing to do with it. If anything, it's a question of whether you are enjoying yourself with an activity or not. If the activity of reading a book bores you, then why keep doing it?
There's nothing wrong with slow pacing, but it still needs to be entertaining. "Trust me, it get's good later" just isn't a good argument to do something you don't enjoy as entertainment, when there are plenty of other things you can do instead.
I think patience has nothing to do with it. If anything, it's a question of whether you are enjoying yourself with an activity or not. If the activity of reading a book bores you, then why keep doing it?
There's nothing wrong with slow pacing, but it still needs to be entertaining. "Trust me, it get's good later" just isn't a good argument to do something you don't enjoy as entertainment, when there are plenty of other things you can do instead.
I think patience has nothing to do with it. If anything, it's a question of whether you are enjoying yourself with an activity or not. If the activity of reading a book bores you, then why keep doing it?
There's nothing wrong with slow pacing, but it still needs to be entertaining. "Trust me, it get's good later" just isn't a good argument to do something you don't enjoy as entertainment, when there are plenty of other things you can do instead.
Is one chapter enough to decide to know if the rest of the book will bore you not every book can start off like a James bond film.
Is one chapter enough to decide to know if the rest of the book will bore you not every book can start off like a James bond film.
I think patience has nothing to do with it. If anything, it's a question of whether you are enjoying yourself with an activity or not. If the activity of reading a book bores you, then why keep doing it?
There's nothing wrong with slow pacing, but it still needs to be entertaining. "Trust me, it get's good later" just isn't a good argument to do something you don't enjoy as entertainment, when there are plenty of other things you can do instead.
Is one chapter enough to decide to know if the rest of the book will bore you not every book can start off like a James bond film.