I suppose Janeane could change into a snake. Nah, that never helps.

This is why I like watching airline movies with no headphones.

Alistair MacLean's When Eight Bells Toll begins with a single paragraph describing a Peacemaker Colt. Paragraph 2 has another couple of sentences about the effect a bullet from the gun has on the human body, and then reads:

And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh.

That seems like a fine example of following the advice given above.

How's this for an opening sentence?

Lianna’s life had already taught her that, when awakening in pain and confusion, it was often better if she didn’t open her eyes right away.

Or opening two sentences:

I smelled him before I saw him. In fact, I was pretty worried I wouldn’t see him at all, what with the blizzard, so I decided to slow down almost to the speed limit.

I can think of successful writers who seem to have forgotten this. It's maybe not so critical with a series, but David Weber started out Path of the Fury with one woman against a band of murderous space-pirates, while he's started a Honor Harrington novel with two friends discussing politics while watching a baseball game.

Well, I suppose Patrick O'Brian could pull off tricks like that.

And I remember one contemporary thriller that felt like three consecutive short novels. And that was first publication. But while the first third started very much in the middle of things, the middle third had a very long-winded opening.

Of course, get the story started applies to all sorts of story, and Austen's "It is a truth univerally acknowledged..." is as strong an opening for that sort of story as any guy pointing a gun at the hero would be for its sort of story.

Xopher #s 4 & 5: "There was a single fish left in the window. It stared blankly at him."

As the flash grew brighter, Dan decided that maybe he should have cut the red wire instead.

Hey, are you guys making fun of me?

*destroys all copies of his fiction*

Dave 6: People who buy Honor Harrington books aren't buying them because of the wonderful writing. A writer who names his crazy revolutionary character Rob S. Pierre just makes me think "orubyq gur cbjre bs purrfr."

The innards had gone an angry red color, accounting for that nasty odor, and he wished yet again that he had been able to score a better brand of grail.

Xopher #9: No.

Hmm. Another opening: "She knew that the rules in force would prevent any action. Still, she did not see any other option but to call on the Commissioner."

Since knowing how not to start can be helpful, behold: the Lyttle Lytton Contest. One sentence, 25 words, and a whole bunch of hysterically bad ideas.

It was Thursday, and a bad one at that, as I explained to the officer for the eleventh time that I hadn't killed that guy, I was just desecrating the corpse.

Xopher, 9: Yep. That right there is what made me swear off Weber forever. Not even treecats are worth it.

I heart XKCD.

That is all.

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

J.G. Ballard, High Rise

Dave Bell @ 6: Of course, get the story started applies to all sorts of story, and Austen's "It is a truth univerally acknowledged..." is as strong an opening for that sort of story as any guy pointing a gun at the hero would be for its sort of story.

Absolutely. There are many ways to seduce your reader into the story. (I'm sure I don't need to go further with that analogy.)

I remember a bit of opening dialogue from a bad 70s TV series:

"Why won't you marry me?"
"Because I'm in love with you."
"You've married lots of other people."
"But I wasn't in love with them."

That grabbed me. When they took their coats off, revealing the clerical collar on the man, I lost interest quickly.

There's a lesson in there, I fancy.

Btw, the two openings I quoted in my first two entries in this thread were actual story beginnings of mine. I didn't think they were that bad.

Erik @ 13 - In truth, I like it. It's particularly good read aloud - Gilian Anderson, perhaps.

Hope you've written the rest!

Xopher #18: I'm interested. Are they posted on some pixel-stained techno-hut where I could read them? I tried searching for "I smelled him before I saw him." but all I found was a romance story which didn't seem like yours.

TomB 20: No, neither is finished yet. I have this little epicyclic editing problem...

I liked them also, Xopher and I'd read on if offered the opportunity.

While tossing out old books recently, I came across a vein of old Zelazny, with the result that I've just reread Creatures of Light and Darkness and Jack of Shadows. Slim, trim (remember the days when you could publish a 140-page novel?) , and they move briskly, especially Jack, which has the protagonist captured on the third page (and executed on the seventh).

#23: Just why HAVE SF novels gotten so damn big? (I was going to write "bloated," but wanted to be polite. He wrote, being impolite.)

The bookshelves with my SF&F collection is a couple of feet from my right elbow. The faves of my youth look like promotional chap books.

Xopher@ #18: On the other hand, here's that joke done correctly.

If they made a movie of that comic, with Janeane Garofalo playing herself, I would watch the living daylights out of it.

The first sentence of what I'm working on now isn't very exciting: Lauren is in bed awake and doesn't want to get up, or can't. But I feel like I make up for that by having her tear some of her skin off before the end of the first page.

Xkcd holds sway over my geeky heart.

I use to have: "The sleep of Kings is not restful if they sleep at all."
As a starting line and a paragraph that summed up the political situation as then King tosses back and forth then next thing you know murder in the bedroom. Then I said nah, and discarded it for a few years and now for some strange reason it keeps popping back up in my head. The current version starts up post murder in the afterlife.
My muse can't make up her fickin mind, what's left of it at any rate. But damn it's hard getting out of the starting gate right.
In awe of the pros.

I kinda like Xopher's two contributions, too. I'd probably fiddle with #4, but #5 would say to me, "What the heck is he doing speeding in a blizzard in the first place, and why?"

"The assassin came in and ordered waffles."

ethan #26 wrote:

> If they made a movie of that comic, with Janeane Garofalo playing herself, I would watch the living daylights out of it.

She's a real person? [...Googles...]

And here I was thinking xkcd was made up!

"Although Henry arrived early for the end of the universe, his personal Recording Angel was as prepared as such a being would be expected to be. Henry would probably have been more impressed if he had realized that he was dead."

The first (and currently only) two lines to a story that stubbornly has refused to be written for more than a year now. And it's not as if that were a solitary line with nothing attached; I have a pretty good idea of how the story goes. But Henry just won't let me write him until I know more about him, and he's been very unforthcoming. Characters can be a real pain in the arse sometimes.

The cosmic realignment brought about by the death of God had surprised Nietzsche; that the dead had escaped hell was to be expected, that they had escaped hell as zombies pillaging heaven was not.

Opening sentences in my early, unpublished novels:

Opening 1. "You're not listening to me," the woman told the soldier.

Opening 2. He was the last politician, and everyone called him "Kansler".

Too much scene-setting and certainly not enough action...
But how about this one?

Opening 3. The floor is slippery with blood and I don't know which is mine.
:-S

I always thought Chris Bunch and Allan Cole nailed it with the opening sentence to the first book in their multi-book STEN series:

Death came quietly to The Row.

In my own writing, it seems I always spend at least the first 50 pages setting the whole book up.... then I really get started, detach and isolate those first fifty pages, and eventually salt the most salient parts into the body of the work at later points.

I think there is also something to be said for that old trick where you jump into a real attention-grabbing scene, with action or suspense or some kind of crucial event taking place, something really juicy, and you go right up until the climax of that particular scene, at which point the main character thinks to him or herself, "I can't believe this all started out back when...."

Then you have your excuse to jump back in time (and to the next chapter) where you can give some exposition and do some character intros and work things up in a more relaxed manner.

=^)

A.R.Yngve #33: The floor is slippery with blood and I don't know which is mine.

Jeez, stop telling so much and start showing, already!

This one struck a little close to home. When I put in a lunch order, in the sort of place where you pay first, I typically factor the number they give me. It's a mental vacation to the 15th (?) century introduction of algebra to Europe: son-of-a-bitch, X^n-1 is always divisible by x-1!

Hmmm, the published story of mine that's gotten the most notice--

(that's "Death & The Ugly Woman", which has gotten me fan letters, exclamations of "OhmigodyouwroteDeath&TheUglyWoman!", hugs, a painting based on the story, requests to adapt it for oral storytelling, and a movie option; if I'm remembered as a writer at all, it'll probably be for that story)

--started out with a long descriptive passage of a river and the towns along it. Then the death and suffering starts.

I will say, though, that D&TUW has what is probably the best ending line I've ever written:

"And the children die, gently, in their sleep."

While reading a Sunday Paper Magazine this morning I was struck by this opening to an article:

Sir Paul McCartney is standing in my kitchen making a dressing for the salad. We are discussing abstract artists.

What a waste that this is non-fiction.

BRT, #34: This might just be me, but I kind of hate the "Action action ACTION! ...I can't believe this all started when [boring backstory]" trick. Especially when the boring backstory drags on for fifty pages, or when the ACTION was obviously invented to try to draw me in. I have nothing against ACTION openings, but I feel they should have some sort of relevance to the story.

I dunno. I usually can't see the shape of the whole story at the beginning, which means I can't see the logical place to start it. So I go ahead and start writing, and don't worry about the beginning until I've gotten to the end, by which point I know enough about the story as a whole to make an intelligent choice about where to start it.

Stefan (24), irritating but true: Sf and fantasy novels have gotten so darned big because y'all collectively like them that way. Short novels are a harder sell. The other reason is that authors have been writing them that way. If long books stopped selling, I expect authors would trim the fat. People who think badly of editors for not doing the trimming themselves have no idea how long it takes to trim and tighten an entire book.

G. Jules (39), it sounds like you don't have a problem with the fast opening so much as a problem with the fast opening done badly.

If only XKCD didn't consume so much of my time whenever anyone posted a link to it...

Stefan Jones @24: Just why HAVE SF novels gotten so damn big?

I remember the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stand On Zanzibar, and Dune. After those three, it seemed every paperback aspired to be as thick.

The book that became 'Dune', I think had been compiled out of a couple of novellas. I recall reading a critique of 'Stand On Zanzibar' that described it as two novels patched together in a movie editing fashion (and pointed to sections in the book titled 'Tracking with Closeups' to underline the point).

In my minor brush with publishing (working on what would have been a technical book for texturing in CGI), the publisher wanted a 500 page book to justify the price they were going to want to charge.

#34 BRT: "I think there is also something to be said for that old trick where you jump into a real attention-grabbing scene, with action or suspense or some kind of crucial event taking place, something really juicy, and you go right up until the climax of that particular scene, at which point the main character thinks to him or herself, "I can't believe this all started out back when....""

I liked that trick too until I saw it beat to death episode after episode in the second half of Battlestar Galactica season two. How many times, you ask yourself, can they show you ten utterly context-free seconds of the actioned-packed!&trade climax, followed by a sudden cut to a serene scene-establishing shot of the fleet with a "72 HOURS EARLIER" floating placidly underneath? AT LEAST ONE MORE, APPARENTLY!

Sorry. I'm a little bitter. Ahem.

We live in the bones of our ancestors.

Somehow knowing that first sentence gives me everything I need to know about the world--its politics, its people, everything; yet, gives me no idea what the story I'm going to tell there. *le sigh*

Bruce Arthurs @ 37: OMG, you're that Bruce Arthurs. ::embarrassing fangrrl squee::

I remember reading that entire story aloud to a girl I was babysitting. We were both on the edges of our seats. My voice gave out, but no way was I stopping before the end.

Call me Dawyne... (ED note: that doesn't sound right.)
Call me Bob... (ED note: that doesn't sound right either.)
Call me Ishmael... (ED note: much better. Now cut to the whaling chase. And could you find a way to sneak Jeneane Garofalo onboard the Pequod, maybe disguise her as a cabin boy?)

(Yes, I stole this... er... was inspired by the Far Side cartoon.)

Bruce Arthurs #44: you can add my embarrassing fangirl squee. That was a wonderful story, and an incredible closing line.

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

-- Anthony Burgess, EARTHLY POWERS

"Sf and fantasy novels have gotten so darned big because y'all collectively like them that way. Short novels are a harder sell."

Teresa, I may not speak for the majority (did I ever?), but I much prefer shorter books. Who has the time to read those brick-sized novels? When do people get the time? Do they speed-read?

Please, please explain. :-S

The star ship Unpronounceable approached the third planet of the unexplored system.

Or for an opening line telegraphing the ending which someone managed to actually get published:

"Lew Garew..."

If only XKCD didn't consume so much of my time whenever anyone posted a link to it...

Jules! You've trapped yourself in a hypothetical situation!

Bruce Arthurs @ 37

OhmigodyouwroteDeath&TheUglyWoman!

-Barbara

Heresiarch @ 43... How many times, you ask yourself, can they show you ten utterly context-free seconds of the actioned-packed!&trade climax, followed by a sudden cut to a serene scene-establishing shot of the fleet with a "72 HOURS EARLIER" floating placidly underneath?

Serene?
On Battlestar Galactica?

"Dear diary... Things are serene today. Nobody died."

Opening lines seem to fall into two categories: the ones that make you really want to keep reading, and the ones that don't work.

This may be why "opening lines which don't work" are a popular mini-genre, featured in lots of contests and collections: Bad opening lines are the ones which work well in isolation. When you read a sentence and find yourself wishing for more, it's probably not that bad as an opening sentence.

On the other hand, a list of great opening lines is incredibly frustrating. It's like listening to the first four seconds of every song on your iPod.

May we at least discuss opening paragraphs? Or talk about the great opening lines of stories that I can actually find on the Internet, like Moby Dick? ("Call me Ishmael." Now there's a line that doesn't work without the rest of its paragraph...)

A. R. Yngve @ 48

But it does explain the term "brick and board bookcase" ;-)

Heresiarch @ 43

Well, it's not just BSG's fault. I'm getting awfully sick of seeing the "N houre earlier" tag myself. The trick of the catchy beginning isn't to kill as many people as possible in first 30 seconds. It's to engage the reader's / viewer's attention. But, as always seems to happen when we're talking about marketing whether, in a turkey lek or a TV ratings competition, as soon as someone finds a gimmick with any advantage at all, everyone joins in an arms race to beat it to death.

*Sigh* I suppose we'll just have to wait until one of the participants in the race grows horns so long they get tangled in the tree branches and die of starvation.

TNH @ #2: "This is why I like watching airline movies with no headphones"

Good, it's not just me. Lots of movies are better with the sound off:

Conan the Barbarian*
The Chronicles of Riddick
Underworld
all Star Wars except ep. 4

*It's OK to play the Basil Poledouris soundtrack in the background if you want

Steve Aylett's wonderful fantasy novella Fain the Sorcerer (which I review as a Short Take in the May Locus) starts with the perfect rationale for its brevity: "Here's the whole story of how Fain the Gardener became Fain the Sorcerer. But I'll tell it quickly by leaving out the lies."

That doesn't mean I'm not a sucker for plenty of long books too. George R.R. Martin, anyone?

A. R. Yngve @ 48

Yes. Dammit.

Normally, fast reading is a blessing (when attempting to understand a technical situation or when doing translation) but when reading is also your primary means of relaxation, it can be expensive unless people publish big fat books like the ones you see today.

There are two factors I use when buying my SF; well, three, but I only figured the third out recently thanks to Charlie Stross. First: do I know the author already? Second: is the page-to-price ratio sufficiently high? Third: how close is it to cyberpunk?

Amazingly, fifteen years after the genre "split" (ish) it took somebody else posting about it to make me realize that I no longer liked a lot of the 70s SF I used to dote on.

It does make it easier on my back to move now, though. So there's a silver lining in every cloud, I suppose.

Incidentally, every time I post I want to remark on the new gide to speling just above the text area -- I get some of them; Gandhi and millennium are hard to get right. But Delany? Asimov? How do you misspell these things? Amisov or something? I'm confused.

(Continued from previous rock)

So if it's not body count that makes a great opening line (or paragraph, you're quite right, MikeB), what is it?

I'm going to go out on a limb and assert* that it depends on the reader. Body count does get to a lot of people, and certainly physical action is some sort of low common denominator. On the other hand, an opening line like

"Fair catch, guv'nor. I lied about the robot. Now what?"

has no physical action whatsoever, but I'd bet it would induce many of the ML folk to at least read on a little further. A lot of other folk might be turned off by it.

On the gripping hand, I suspect I could find a few hundred people in the world who would be intrigued by

"He noticed, with a jolt of recognition, a group of transforms isomorphic to SO8 and rotated the generator fields through 26-space to align himself with the worlds the group must represent."

but everyone else would yawn and drop the book in the fire**.

So, as always, you have to know your audience. We know certain openings well because they either appeal to a very wide audience or to none at all (Bulwer Lytton and ilk). Maybe what gripes me most about the overuse of the some of the gimmicks we've been talking about is the sense that the writers are trying to get a larger audience than the work as a whole will really support; the kind of desperation you see in really bad Hollywood adaptations.

* My intact amateur status allows me to make assertions of this type without any expectation of them being taken as more than conversational gambits. That's fine; we can solve the problems of the world for real in alt.universe.do-overs.

** I'm in that small group, but then I thought that a good part of the action in the Amber series was rather repetitious (come on, now, how many books does it take to describe a coup that completely re-establishes the cosmic order?). I read them for the fascinating hints of an over-arching metaphysical order he kept dropping. OK, I'm a nerd, QED.

Heresiarch @ #43 and Serge @ #53, BSG beats that technique to death so badly because the writing staff really likes it and think it's good. Ron Moore said so in a couple of the podcasts he did for those episodes.

I actually very strongly recommend against listening to those podcasts. I think mainlining them over a week at work played a major part in my inability to watch the show without cringing anymore.

I keep wanting to post about the miniscule Tolkein ocurrence I witnessed the other day (I'm rather a connaisseur of the genre, Theresa, so I hope you'll accomodate me in my tangent) -- its really an embarrasment that I can't fully recall it's wierd run-up, but since the Millenium I've had troubles with that. See, I was reading Publisher's Weekly, as one does, and fondly recalling the stories of Dellany in Asimoff's old mag, about the heirarchy of deities in Pharoah's day... Well, suffice to say, Ghandi comes up again and again.

Or something.

Re: #48 ::: A.R.Yngve ::: "[...] I much prefer shorter books."

I don't, by any means always, but perhaps this general preference explains why I seem to have read (he says, bemusedly) more Mysteries (Historical, Ethnic, Local Color) in the past few years than I've read s-f. On another tentacle, one of my all-time favorite fiction books is the pseudo-autobiography "Tristram Shandy", in which the protagonist just barely gets born at the end. Apparently my enjoyment of books depends mostly on some other factor(s) than whether they're succinct & incisive, or discursive.

Bruce @ 60, that does sound rather intriguing. Both of'em, actually. Both at the same time would be even better:

"Fair catch, guv'nor. I lied about the robot. What next?" I extemporized, noting with a jolt of recognition the group of transforms isomorphic to SO8 and planning how best to rotate the generator fields through 26-space to align myself with the worlds the group must represent.

I'd hit it.

She wanted to run the lights and siren, but if she did, Giraux would never let her borrow the car again.

A.R.Yngve@#48:

Who has the time to read those brick-sized novels? When do people get the time? Do they speed-read?

I naturally read very fast. Even reading for craft hasn't slowed me down much; a slim novel will take me, at the outside, four hours to read the first time through - if I'm dead tired. That won't stop me from buying something I'm really looking forward to, but I vastly prefer books that will last me through a week or two of lunchtimes, or most of the way through a long trip. I've tried simply reading more slowly, but it hasn't worked.

Scott H. @ 57

Underworld - much better with the picture off as well.

#34 BRT,

Seems to me "Lost" has that trick down pat. Immediate action followed by telegraphed music cue which alerts viewer that a flashback is coming. Four or five minutes expended on flashback, then the show cuts back to now (for whatever "now" is on that blasted island).

Bruce Cohen @ 67... I'd say the same thing about Conan the Barbarian. Not about Conan the Destroyer which, unlike CtB, it doesn't take itself seriously, and has Grace Jones.

Remember how 1967's Mission Impossible used to begin with a rapid montage of what would happen in the episode, instead of coming up with a teaser act? Does anybody know which TV show first used that device? Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds began that way, in 1964, but are there even older antecedents?

With a fixed quantity of goodness-per-book, I prefer a short book over a long one. If goodness-per-page is fixed, I prefer the long.

The first rule seems more likely to hold with what I think of as plot-driven novels, e.g., mysteries and descendants of the Hornblower stories. The second rule is good for anything in which I value scene-setting, which may be interior (Balzac, Trollope), exterior (Dunnett, Braudel) or poetic (Tolkien, Susannah Clarke).

?Tanith Lee? starts a novel with the heroine regaining consciousness in an exploding volcano, which is adequately exciting, but the heroine also has amnesia, which eliminates the flashbacks in favor of going places and finding things out. It was very satisfactory pulp. I think the metaphor is useful, given that all of us are born into a world as surprising as an exploding volcano and no-one knows the full story of how we got here, or in whose handbasket.

In #57 Scott H. writes:

Good, it's not just me. Lots of movies are better with the sound off:

The original Battlestar Galactica.

Great opening line:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
- Genesis, date unknown

Not so great opening line:

"The first thing he was aware of was a sensation of smooth, yielding grittiness."
- Karl Zeigfreid [Lionel Fanthorpe], No Way Back, 1968

"I knew it was going to be one of those days," the Ayatollah explained over her wine glass, "when I woke up in bed with the Israeli ambassador, his catamite, and a burst Baby Jesus™ brand condom."

(I haven't written the rest yet. So there.)

G. Jules @39: This might just be me, but I kind of hate the "Action action ACTION! ...I can't believe this all started when [boring backstory]" trick.

I share the hate. Especially as that's exactly the way my mind is working when I'm writing. By now I have pretty much resigned myself to writing the first chapter after I finished a story, because I always seem to start with the second one.

Emma, 65: Speaking of great openings, I read Finder last night. I cried in all the obvious places, but at the end I felt better.

A.R. Yngve, 73: Actually that's the Gospel of John. Genesis is "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." John has a lot of philosophy before you get to the plot--a classic case of telling rather than showing.

Used judiciously and infrequently in a TV series, the "n hours/days earlier" thing works for me. I've seen it done well in X-Files and Angel. Once it starts getting used regularly, it loses any impact it had, and did I mention I stopped watching BSG? (Of course, at certain points in the series I stopped watching X-Files and Angel, too, but much later, relatively.)

I will read a certain number* of beginning pages of pure description and/or character introduction if it's at least well-written, trusting that the good writing means that the establishment will help support whatever conflicts are coming. Since interpersonal/inter-family/internal conflict are all things that really work better when you understand the people to some degree, it makes sense sometimes to start with them. The sooner you can throw in the hints of something being not-at-all-well, the better, of course.

[*Not a fixed number, obviously. Sooner or later, either they get to the conflit or I say "Bored now".]

Obviously I will always give more room to an author I do know and like to establish the story than one I don't, but writers I don't know who have a flair for words get a lot of slack, too.

I worry about the pace of my own novels, subsequently, as they are often much more about the people than the plot.

I read quickly, myself, which is why I re-read books often. It's very rare that I book I finish does not get at least one re-reading. Possibly if I were a slower reader, I might end up a bit pickier about openings, but some days I just really need something to read. :)

Charlie @74: I'm sure I'm not the only member of your crit group who's thinking, "I know you haven't written the rest of it yet, stop taunting us and get on with it, you @#$%^."

Here is my favorite Xkcd cartoon of all time. It explains damn near everything.

Emma, TexAnne: I re-read Finder about once every two months. Damn fine opening, and I bawl like a baby every. Single. Time.

I'm a pretty fast reader--I read a novel, albeit a rather short and silly one, from start to finish over lunch yesterday without getting puzzled looks from the waitstaff--but I share A. R. Yngve's animus against long books. Even in those cases where I can't find anything in particular I would have left out, it's often just too much of a good thing. There are exceptions, of course, but not enough to keep me from needing a lot more persuading to buy a long book than a short. A specific example of something I would have bought by now if it were of normal length is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which seems like the sort of thing I would like, but damn.

Series are even worse, and these days I only read them if written by my favorite authors, and then somewhat grudgingly.

#80: "A specific example of something I would have bought by now if it were of normal length is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which seems like the sort of thing I would like, but damn."

Whereas I, at least, think that if Jonathan Strange were of normal length, it would suck, by comparison if not on an absolute scale.
Come to think of it, perhaps I should find the time to reread it. I love long books.

The same observation holds true for video games. The most beloved console RPG series (Final Fantasy) reliably dumps you right into the action, does the exciting sequence, radically shifts gears (often changing time (FFT, FFX), place (FF8, FFT, FFX), or perspective/style (FF9, FF6, FFT), and then gets on with the tutorial, setting explanation, and the start of the main portion of the narrative. My favorite, FFT (Tactics) starts with a semi-cryptic framing narration, shifts to a young woman praying, who quickly needs protection from an abduction attempt (this is where your character, and the first battle of the game, come in), and after that battle jumps back a good bit of time to when your character was a trainee, and close friend to the eventual abductor.

Less-beloved RPGs start with a bunch of kids harassing wildlife. This doesn't engage the player quite as reliably.

anaea 61: BSG podcasts == after-the-fact pitch sessions...with spoilers.

Michael 62: Hit. Hit. Hit.

clew 71: Yes, it was Tanith Lee. The Birthgrave.

A.R. 73: TexAnne beat me to it, but I'd just like to say that I noticed it wasn't Genesis before she pointed it out. Logos == Christos == God was the innovation of the author of the "John" Gospel. And me a Pagan!

TexAnne 76: I like the version that starts "In the beginning, the Elohim created the Heavens and the Earth." Elohim, note, is a PLURAL noun.

KristianB @ 81: Agreed. The book simply wouldn't work as the kind of book it is if were it shorter; the setup would be wrong, the tone would be wrong, it wouldn't echo the style of the era it's set in. That strong feeling of place and time is a large part of what made the book for me.

It wouldn't neccessarily be a bad book if it didn't have those things, but it wouldn't be the strong, resonant work it is, either.

Serge @ 69

Agreed. The best thing about Conan the Barbarian is the set design by Ron Cobb, and you don't need the sound for that.

"Okay, guys. This time, a little more shooting, and a lot less getting shot. Got it?"

Charlie Stross #74: I'll buy that novel when it comes out.

(On a slightly related note, I've long been disappointed that Burgess did not produce a sequel to Little Wilson and Big God.)

I'm sure I'm not the only member of your crit group who's thinking, "I know you haven't written the rest of it yet, stop taunting us and get on with it, you @#$%^."

And I'm sure I'm not the only fluorospherian who's thinking, "For every story being inspired into existence in this thread there are 30 stories that got killed off in a weekend marathon of BoomShine. Come August, only the unwired luddites will be submitting stories to the overlords of lightmaking, and they will have a clean inbox just in time for Japan."

The original Battlestar Galactica is even better with both the sound and the picture off.

Bruce Cohen @ 85... True, no need for sound to admire Ron Cobb's set design. On the other hand, one does need sound to appreciate Max von Sydow's wonderful granite-block-against-granite-block voice. (As for James Earl Jones's wig, that is one argument for turning the video off too.

There are certain books that are all the better because they're long. Lord of the Rings is in that category for some people; for me, it's Ash: A Secret History and Cavalier and Klay. There's something about the expansiveness, the potential for a story that is huge and overarching and swallows your life whole for a month, and seems to encompass all the world--it's something that's worth going after.

It keeps me reading long books in the hope that they will be that kind of book, when all too frequently they're just decent 200-page books padded out to twice their size.

Emily H. @ 92:

Even I have to agree that such books exist, and that it would be a boring world if no one ever swung for the fences.

Bruce, #37: OMGFANGIRLSQUEEE! That story is just perfect on so many levels -- one of which is that it's almost completely non-formulaic, and therefore stands out vividly in the memory against a background of plot tics that get done over and over again. (Sometimes memorably, but still plot tics. It takes special imagination to come up with something really different.) And yes, the last line is outstanding -- it's my second-favorite ending line ever.

My favorite ending line ever? That would be from C.S. Friedman's The Madness Season:

"I made myself the body of a leather bird, and joined her."

But you have to read the whole book to understand why that's such a perfect ending line.

And, getting back to the topic of opening lines, I defy anyone not to be curious about the rest of this story:

"This year the Ribieros' daffodils seeded early, and they seeded cockroaches."

Well, my favorite opening line is...

In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by
the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest,
covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys
which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.

Four paragraphs later we finally get:
The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that
forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter.

followed nine paragraphs from the beginning with the first dialog:

"The curse of St Withold upon these infernal porkers!" said the
swine-herd, after blowing his horn obstreperously, to collect
together the scattered herd of swine, which, answering his call
with notes equally melodious, made, however, no haste to remove
themselves from the luxurious banquet of beech-mast and acorns on
which they had fattened, or to forsake the marshy banks of the
rivulet, where several of them, half plunged in mud, lay
stretched at their ease, altogether regardless of the voice of
their keeper.

(Ivanhoe, if you're interested. Now that's a fat, huge, sprawling fantasy tome.)

I find, no matter how old I get, that there are few opening sentences better than "There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubs, and he almost deserved it."

Line from real life which is a novel in and of itself: "After I kicked heroin, I moved to Cabo to run a crummy little hotel with my mother."

Lee 93: The one about the daffodils, is that from a Janet Kagan story? It sounds familiar.

I do think that the whole start-with-an-action-flashback trope has become so commonplace as to lose the majority of its power now. It probably needs to lie fallow for a couple of decades before it would start to become effective again.

Explicit foreshadowing seems to be in the same state for the same reason. I very much enjoyed Wilson's Spin, for example, but got tired of his repeated use of the construction, "This insignificant detail would become relevant when major character experienced as yet unencountered major plot point" at the end of what seemed to be pretty much every chapter. And he used a flashback viewpoint throughout....

Showing an endpoint, or a partial endpoint, and using the narrative to establish how things happened rather than what's going to happen is a classic Hitchcockian means of creating suspense. But it's been done to death: everyone knows what's going on, and it tastes stale. In the worst case, when you get to the "one hour earlier", you feel like you're going backwards, and that you've now got to sit through god-knows-how-much ancient history until you can actually start going forward with the narrative again. "How it happens" is theoretically suspenseful, but it doesn't have the narrative momentum of "what happens next".

This isn't a rejection of foreshadowing. I'm still in awe at an apparently throwaway line in Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters: "You'd have to be a born fool to want to be a king." The whole book is contained in that one sentence, but the key thing is that it 's not apparent until you actually reach the end. It's successful in that case, I think, because it's used to colour your understanding in hindsight and to add structure, rather than to set up and manipulate your expectations in advance.

Going back to the first chapter thing, I think that if you want to start off going straight into an action scene then the Indiana Jones/James Bond introduction structure has much to recommend it. Coming in at the end of what appears to be the previous instalment you get an instant action entrance to get you past the first page, and involved before the main story has to be set up. And if it's done well, you get your foreshadowing and arch-nemesis introduction built in, without feeling like you've actually come to a complete narrative halt at the end of it.

My favorite opening line is still from One Hundred Years of Solitude:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

And generally speaking, I tend to believe that bad opening lines can be forgiven. The worst thing a book can do to me is have that boring filler quality where I look up and realize that I'm at the bottom of the page with absolutely no recollection of how or why I got there.

Well (in response to #97) there are some works where it becomes pretty obvious early on that they're going to use the Incident-then-backstory device repeatedly. And if they're well enough done, I've been willing to go along with them for the ride.

It's been a while since I've read Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_, but it was clear not too far in that one that most if not all the chapters opened with some Surprising/Alarming Incident, with a fair bit of the chapter to follow giving the background to that incident. But it was was done entertainly enough that I was happy to think "okay; how is he going to have *this* end up happening?" rather than think "not this device again". Though I'd probably find it tiresome if I read book after book using that technique.

Most of the _Overboard_ comic strips consist of some incident followed by a revelation of an unexpected backstory that makes it funny. I get a chuckle out of it much of the time, but it's not to everyone's taste. Maybe it's just one of my weak spots.

And of course, the movie _Memento_ takes the convention about as far as it can go, with the whole movie being Incident -- Backstory Incident -- Further-Backstory Incident -- and so on, each shift being initially disorienting but eventually shedding light on the incidents we've previously seen. I remeber having a wonderful sense of vertigo when I first saw it, and also a feeling at the end that it wasn't the sort of thing that could be replicated. Though apparently folks have tried, judging from the various ads I've seen for movies that claim to be "like Mememto". So far I haven't been tempted to see any of them, though.

Jp #97: If you ask me, the master of that technique (though her use might be a bit different than you describe) is Muriel Spark. There are very few of her novels where you don't know how they end well before the ending, and yet they consistently surprise. Not SF by any means, but if I had to pick a favorite writer of all time it'd be her.

"[timeperiod] earlier" is the lazy way to do it. The interesting way is to have characters in the present who *don't* know what just happened try to find out. You can start right off with "The prince was dead." and have the first chapter be mostly about establishing what happened - and still be interesting. Or have two members of the survey team come back to camp on the not-yet-named planet (after seeing their shuttle make a sudden unscheduled liftoff) and find the charred remains of their tents.

If the characters don't know all of what happened, you have a convenient way to reveal it gradually to the reader, and not as an ungraceful chunk of exposition.

Of course, it helps if you're a really good writer, and have interesting things going on in the "present" as well as the "past".

Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, the start of the whole 'Mars' trilogy, begins in media res with a major dramatic plot inflection, then heads both back & forwards. Later I think he puts in a reference to the device, referring to a scene in a lesser-known Shakespearean play as the crossing point of the 'X' of plot arcs. Some readers have objected, saying they'd prefer to start at the 'beginning' and just go straight through. The books remain favourites of mine, though I suspect there's a lot more in them than I understand, just seeing the trailing hem of many little hints.

I like the way LeGuin does it in The Dispossessed. She starts two timelines that join up in the middle. Best line: "You can share the handkerchief I use."

My entries in the "first lines of things" stakes (these are from a couple of chapters of an ongoing fanfic, which is still in the process of being proofed prior to beta-ing).

Tirren startled awake, the terror of a nightmare still strong.

It took a few minutes for the crew of the Ortega to realise what the charge on the entry hatch had done.

Oh, and could Mr Stross put me down for a copy of the novel which goes with that opening line of his, when he finds the round tuit it belongs to? Thanks.

I won't post the first line of my current work in progress, because I know it's dreadful. It usually takes me about two pages of writing before I figure out what it is that I'm writing about, and so there's no point in showing off that drivel of mine until I've had a chance to edit it. But I'll admit I'm still fond of the image of a wizened old vampire shaking a handful of rice in someone's face, having finally counted all the grains thrown in its path.

My current favorite first line is from Tinker, which begins:

"The wargs chased the elf over Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage's tall chain-link fence shortly after the hyperphase gate powered down."

Xopher @ 96

Yes.

Jp:

I'm still in awe at an apparently throwaway line in Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters: "You'd have to be a born fool to want to be a king."

My favorite ending line is in "And Having Writ..." by Donald R. Bensen, and does a similar stunning trick. Without cheapening the book, it converts the entire text in front of it into a giant shaggy-dog story--and if you read it before you finish the book you won't get the joke. Now that's a trick to beat...

Dave Bell #6 and TNH #40: but I would pay twice as much for an Honor Harrington book that was trimmed and tightened all the way through.

Xopher #103: Have you read Algis Budrys's Who? It's got the same plot structure as The Dispossessed, with the first chapter in the middle, the second chapter at the beginning, and the last chapter being the one that takes place right before the first. (Who?'s a lot shorter too, which would be a point in its favor except that The Dispossessed is one of my very favorite sf novels.)

Xopher, #96: Yes -- it's the opening to "The Loch Moose Monster". You can get that and the 5 or 6 other stories she did in the same universe collected under the title Mirabile.

I frequently like the kind of opening where some important back-story information is given right at the beginning and tagged with a date/time stamp, or described as "Prologue". Three examples of this being done well:

1) The movie version of Murder on the Orient Express.
2) The first X-Men movie.
3) S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire.

To me, that's like a label saying, "We'll be into the action soon enough, but you'll need to know about this once you get there."

This entire discussion reminds me of Aristophanes' deliciously funny play The Frogs.

The backstory: Dionysus, bored with the lack of good playwrights, goes down to Hades (with sundry adventures on the side) to bring back either Aeschylus or Euripides. But first he has to choose which one is the best.

Among the contests he puts them through is a comparison of the prologues of their plays (starting at line 1119.). They get picked apart in terms of content and meter, and even weighed (there's an excellent reason to bring in a river, or a few dead bodies - it adds to the weight). My favourite part begins at line 1200, when Aeschylus destroys Euripides' formulaic approach with an oil jug.

Ye gods, that sounds dry when I explain it. Just trust me that it's funny enough to seduce a 14 year old into a lifelong love of the Classics.

(And this xkcd makes me laugh every time I see it.

Bob #47: That opening line of Burgess' sold the book to me. (Mind you, I will read anything on Emmet's say-so, but if hypothetically someone else had quoted me that line, I would still have felt compelled to buy the book then and there.) Then I actually started reading the book and a couple of paragraphs in there's a comment that makes the opening even better.

Similarly brilliant: Rose Macaulay's

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

What's great about that is that it really does give you an indication of what the whole book is like.

#108 I would pay twice as much for an Honor Harrington book that was trimmed and tightened all the way through.

Quite so. Less exposition and more spaceships exploding please*. On the other hand, if you took too much out, it wouldn't be an Honor Harrington novel anymore. It's almost as though editors need to be highly skilled to be able to draw the line between what the writer writes and what the audience wants to read (Originally I was going to make this point about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but was beaten to it. Also, if I used smilies, there'd be one at the end of this paragraph)

Abi - the oil jug joke gets used by Tom Holt in The Walled Orchard, when Aristophanes and the hero Eupolis are captured by theatre-mad Scilians and improvise some comedy for them. Which lead me to tracking down Aristophanes works and the rest is h/i/s/t/o/r/y comedy.

* One thing that suprised me is that, as everyone knows, for the type of naval/space-war-opera that Weber is writing, you need at least two exciting ship/space battles per novel. Yet he's confident enough by Field of Dishonor to have NO space battles in at all.

Xopher #83:

No, it isn't. You can tell by the verb, which is singular.

I always loved the opening sentence of the Dashiell Hammett short story Flypaper:

"It was a wandering daughter job."

which sums up the case and the protagonist in one go. It's fragile though - the French translation comes out as:

"Il s'agissait d'une affaire de fugue."

("It consisted of a case of [unspecified person] running away") which is rather a damp squib in comparison. On the other hand, I bought Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines on the strength of the opening sentence alone:

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

and that loses nothing whatever in translation. (Of course, French readers might have preferred the adventures of a self-propelled, voracious Paris, but that would have been an entirely different book.)

I would like to humbly proffer my favourite opening line from a series I am currently re-reading (in fervent hope of obtaining the latest volume from the local Library before I forget what was happening at the end of the previously-current volume):

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

Naomi@#114: Not only is Xopher correct*, but in this case, the verb would be no help; 'created' would be used either way. Politicians created a mess, for instance, while I created this sentence.

[*You could argue the English usage of the word could be classified as a collective noun, but the actual originating word is, without doubt, plural.]

Tina #117: Naomi is right, and I'm afraid your counter-argument doesn't make sense. Xopher (#83) based his point on the fact that the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, is vaguely plural-looking. In Hebrew, verbs inflect for person and number even in the past tense. The Hebrew noun Elohim is governed by a singular Hebrew verb in almost every case, including the one Xopher cited, so it's no more plural than the word princess is plural because it ends in an S.

There is some evidence for multiple gods in the OT, but that isn't it. If you attempt to read Genesis without the filter of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, you can argue that the other gods are real, but one is enjoined not to worship them. The technical name for this is henotheism as opposed to monotheism.

Your best evidence for Elohim as plural is Genesis 1:26, where Elohim said [singular] "Let us create [plural] a human in our image" But it's not very convincing, because the verb is still singular. And honestly, I don't see why any Pagan would want to find evidence for several gods in the Bible. If you reject the Bible as a sacred text, why do you care about the fragments that might happen to support your world view when the vast majority is clearly against Paganism?

I've always been a huge fan of the beginnings that start with:

1.Extremely off-beat statements about the universe

And then one or more of the following.
2. Moderately unusual or somewhat ordinary situation viewed in light of these statements
4. Bafflingly ancient/cosmic/literary flashback
3. Problem?

None of these are really "action," per se. They seem to appear primarily in works of humorous fiction. Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams are the ones that spring to mind. These aren't so much opening lines as opening gambits, though.

I am also fond of books that star by explaining why they have to tell this story, or that the story is a lie, or, (and this is one of my favorites) that the entire text is itself a reaction to an entirely nonexistent text that will be referred to with ire throughout.

None of these are really action, but neither are they dull description. I suppose what they are more than anything else is personality.

To be entirely fair, Individ-ewe-al @ 118, there is a word in Biblical Hebrew, "Eloha", which is used to mean God, in the singular, and "Elohim" is used as a plural from time to time.

But that's a bit nit-picky. Eloha is extremely uncommon in Tanakh, and Elohim is used as the singular pretty much throughout. In fact, Elohim is used as the singular for non-Jewish Gods in the Prophets (1 Sam. 5:7, Judges 11: 24 -- if it was the singular form, there wouldn't be a yud, and 1 Kings 18:27 has it meaning Baal without any ambiguity.)

I am so very tired of trying to get the openings of all the things I'm working on JUST RIGHT that I believe I'm going to open all of them with:

(Please skip to Chapter Two)

and go on from there.

Leah Miller @ 119... Extremely off-beat statements about the universe

"The Universe was out to get me."

Yes, the narrator is a cat. How did you guess?

#118: Sorry, I'm not arguing about the basis behind the words, I'm arguing about the word, so most of what you wrote I'm leaving unaddressed.

The word is plural. Whether or not it's standard usage for a word meaning "gods" or just an odd usage for singular isn't my argument. The ending used is a marker of a plural word.

And, since Xopher quoted a sentence in English, naturally I was talking about the verb in English.

This is not a religious argument from my point of view, and I don't see why anyone had to go and turn it into one. I didn't read Xopher to say "Yay, the Bible promotes my viewpoint about multiple gods!" I read him to say that the idea that the sentence could theoretically be read