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.
So, I guess I read your post too fast originally, because I'd glossed over this.
I find it bothersome. I understand that the community at AbsoluteWrite is pretty focused on selling their work, which is fine, but I want to scoff at the limit of three lines, for several reasons I want to expend on here :
In my own work, I tend to have different styles of voices. So, my first three lines can be this :
Her name is Yuri. It's a boy's name, but she loves it. It was given to her by the man.
Or this :
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.
See the difference? But if you were willing to read on so much for three sentences, then why not read more in the one with short sentences?
The second story has 108 words in its 3 first sentences. If I select the first 108 words of the first story, you get this instead :
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.
Gives you way more food for thought and information, doesn't it?
Which one do you think was more gripping?
Now, before I go on and quote the first lines of world famous authors whose work I adore, can we agree that maybe these people did not write extra silly first three sentences just to get noticed? If the beginning was edited, it was probably to make it better. But though beginnings have to be catchy, some books don't pick up until much later on, and in such case, the editors going through their slush piles have only two things to base themselves on : The blurb you provided and the quality and catchiness of your prose.
If they think your plot is interesting and your prose is promising, it's likely they'll give you the time of day and read a couple of chapters. At least so the editors say themselves, as far as my reading of their blogs tells me.
Now :
"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.
Yaaawn! The catchiness of the opening of
North and South by Gaskell is questionable. Edith is not even a secondary character, and is introduced more than anything to establish the character of her friend and cousin, our main girl Margaret. This book is one of my favourite, and still widely read and beloved, 300 years after it was written (aim high!)
Much more punchy is the start of
Pride and Prejudice :
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?"
That is bread and butter, writing wise. Look at that prose and content! She starts with a witty remark, tongue in cheek, that sums up the entire plot of the story, which is about a bunch of sisters marrying a bunch of single dudes in possession of good fortunes. But then she goes deeper into the snark, delving into the more mercenary views of the mothers (typically), who are pretty obsessed about marrying their daughters to the best suitors. It also establishes the grounds for what comes immediately after, a lady asking her husband if he's heard that the local empty-castle-property just got a new renter.
So we can immediately guess that the new neighbours are rich bachelors, and so it is!
Austen hints at the entire plot, and establishes subtly the cliches that will be delved into. Gaskell alludes to nothing in her start.
A different approach, with the first line of the long series of overly-descriptive prehistorical novels by Jean M Auel :
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.
That's quite smart isn't it? You know you're reading prehistorical fiction, but you get immediately worried because the last line is pretty ominous given that we're following a naked child.
What's less funky though, is that if you've picked up the book after getting caught by the blurb, you already know this :
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.
So yeah, reading the first two/three chapters are just garnishing things that were deeply detailed in the back of the book.
Grass, by Sheri S Tepper, one of my hands down favourite Sci-fi :
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.
How descriptive is that for you?
But you know the saddest? You're missing these three final sentences to her intro :
Commoners all, of course. No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.
And that gives a lovely cinch. What aristocrats? These grasses are alien, and yet there are aristocrats? Yep, it's a fascinating book, and Tepper is the mistress of sorcerous descriptions. She has a style and prose that conjures attention and keeps it, yet she does nothing at all beyond painting in a picture in your brain, and make you wonder at the aristocrats' gardens. No characters, no name. Though Grass is the name of the planet, you do not know it.
And now the final blow,
Red Dragon, by Harris, the first appearance of Hannibal Lecter, and favourite thriller book of yours truly.
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.
HOW BORING IS THIS.
How many of your forum friends would run right past one of the best crime novel ever written?
How many of them would have decided to jump In Media Res and go with such lines from the second chapter :
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.
or
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.
Those are iconic lines of the style of Harris, at least in Red Dragon, and still some in Silence of the Lambs (book 2, sadly featuring a different MC). He looses it almost completely 20 years later when he writes Hannibal.
But anyway, such punchlines are what your buds intent to start their stories with. Good on them, they'd probably catch the eye of someone, but could they make a story as satisfying, starting so late?
@Lanko, in Slow starts, answered me using Harris too, and said about these first two chapters :
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.
I could not agree more. I can only add that Harris' work is a masterpiece of a psychological thriller. You can't start in the middle of the action and backfeed us information on Graham. He's a weird guy, and we need to seize his character, Harris needs to hook us into him. And since he's going to make him regret his decisions very badly, we need to be here to see him commit, so that later on in the book we can savour his undoing with all the weight of its cruelty and brutality.
It's a brilliant book on many levels, not least of all the fact that there is so little gore/jump scare type actions, that you're forced to admire the author, because he really makes you crawl out of your skin without using any of the obvious tools–at all.
If you want a better understanding of what Lanko and I allude to, please feel free to get started on the first few chapters of Red Dragon here :
http://embracethemadnessfans.weebly.com/uploads/2/7/5/8/27583023/red_dragon.pdf(at your own risk, it is what ultimately turned me into a morbid "Fannibal", and now I'm writing dark crime fiction instead of fantasy!)
In conclusion : I would not get my head in a pretzel around your beginning. Beginnings are hard, and you can edit and re-write them when you're done, if you feel like you need it to catch an editor's eye.
But instead I would invite you to train at writing better stories.
You can get help from others to polish your first lines. Getting help to write a whole decent novel is harder, and altogether more work. It's ridiculous to learn how to make great one-liners if you don't make great 50.000 liners. Write more short stories. Your first lines will become better because your stories will become better. You'll pinpoint just where to start, just what to hint at. Or you'll learn not to care.
At the end of the day, I'd pity you if you'd spent it all pulling your hair out over three sentences rather than writing a lot of enjoyable plot and character in action, giving yourself the time and freedom of editing and re-writing. You might get hit by a truck tomorrow, go have fun now.
P.S : I'll indulge and give you these for comparison :
Spoiler for Hiden:
I wrote two short stories for the contest that were re-writes of The Little Red Riding Hood. The stories are divided by many months, and ended in interesting circumstances :
The smell is pungent. Rank.
The darkest side of organic, decay brought on by violence.
This is the first three sentences of the first one, written in April 2015. It was my second attempt at a short story, ever.
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.
Different style, this is written in may 2016, a whole year and 13 short stories later! Not the same amount of words...
The first was sharing the third place on the podium, with 7 votes (as a beginner I was dazzled, reality caught back up with me soon enough). We were one vote behind the second place.
The second story also shared the third place, and the second place was also shared by two stories, and they were two votes ahead of us. I only had 5 votes.
Even experience, a whole year of actively writing monthly, did not manage to make me do "better" even though I was reworking a well known story (to me).
I find that all fascinating as well because sometimes people don't vote on stuff I find tremendously better than my other works that were more popular.
Sometimes I disagree with people, I guess I enjoy my own writing more than they do in some stories. It's not that bad, after all I still consider myself as learning. *shrug* gotta have some faith in oneself too, the internet offers you the tiniest of sample of people, and many of them are people who have their heads deep in the jar of technicalities and "rules of writing".
Many famous writers never dipped a finger in that, so don't take it all too much to heart.
