How important is a good opener? Or is the prose style / progression / plot more your thing?
I'm having some trouble, as i always have, with opening my newest short; I know what I want to say but struggle for about a week to find a good way of saying it.
What are your favs? Post examples?
>A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
>Hanno the Navigator,the Carthaginian explorer of the fifth century BC, also known as King Hanno II, is distinguished by having a crater on the moon named after him.
>The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
>Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
I hate doing openers, because I can't find a good one. Either the first sentence is something said by a character, or it is something boring as fuck like "It rained on...".
>>8206648
This is my problem, man.
Or it starts with something like "though"
>>8206648
>either someone says something or something is described
Aren't those literally the only two options?
You guys are making a fuss over nothing. Make sure the first paragraph is good as a whole and you're fine.
>>8206664
>not wanting to hook their readers
>>8206690
good prose hooks the readers more thoroughly than shlocky cliffhangers.
>>8206690
how many books have you dropped because the very first line was shit?
if the first page or two is bad it's more likely but people overstate how important the first line is
>>8206601
the entire book should be perfect from beginning to end
>>8207618
yeah this
i only read perfect books
>>8206728
Ive been inclined to stop reading if a book doesnt interest me from the start.
I thought that was normal
The best openers are single-sentence symbolic summaries of the entire novel.
Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.
>>8206601
Just write an opening line that truly represents the beginning of your story. These short opening lines written purely for the sake of "hooking the reader" feel forced and are fast becoming a literary cliche.
>>8206601
>See the child.
>>8206601
Good closers are more important than good openers.
>>8210091
Seconded.
>>8210091
>Gravity's rainbow had finally come to an end.
>>8207775
I don't read either desu.
>>8206601
>having an opener
Ce matin maman est morte.
>>8210091
Which are rare.
>>8210080
/thread
>>8210677
>implying all stories begin on the first page
They do. Unless you're writing fantasy, then it's acceptable to info dump right from the start.
Where else would you even start from?
>call me Ishmael
>>8210700
Confirmed for never taking a single course on creative writing or ever examining plot structures
>>8210700
By slowly releasing information relevant to the character or plot? As in, why they're doing what they're currently doing may have happened in the past?
>>8206601
Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and waiting as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.
>>8210738
this
after Moby Dick, gunning for good one-liners is an exercise in futility
