Now we’ve looked at some bad examples of first lines, let’s take a look at the six crucial techniques for creating irresistible first lines that your readers will love. If you can’t read your sentence without taking another breath, your sentence is too long!! You’ve got a whole novel to describe stuff - in your first line, every word should matter. Some description is fine in a first-line - but it’s better to keep it brief. I don’t know who the characters are and I don’t need to meet them all in the first paragraph!! First lines should be gripping and when you waste words on naming three or more characters in the first sentence, I won’t keep reading. Like the example from Too Much of a Good Thing above, a first line that is full of information that the reader a) doesn’t need to know right now and b) doesn’t care about is to be avoided at all costs. “Ordinary” dialogue is the kind of everyday dialogue that has a place in a novel - but not in the first line. I’m not totally against using dialogue in a first line, but it’s something that takes a lot of skill and has to really grab my attention. So, what should you avoid in your first line? I have a kind of list of things that will have me clicking out of the preview quicky: The winning entries can be truly hilarious, like the 2019 winner: It’s a comical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The English department at San Jose State University sponsors the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest since 1982. It’s a prime example of one of my pet peeves with first lines - there’s excessive description and irrelevant information that certainly wouldn’t make me want to read on. Try to read that one out loud and you’ll run out of breath before you run out of words. "Seeing how the victim’s body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer “Dirk” Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase “sandwiched” to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt." Then there’s this one, from Joel Phillips in Too Much of a Good Thing: Huh? Her father brought her eyes from San Francisco? When you consider this was not self-published and Danielle Steele is a bestselling novelist with lots of experience, it makes me wonder what the copy editor was thinking letting this go to print! "She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco," How about this one for a really terrible first line?: Too many novels that I browse with “Look Inside” fail to compel me to keep reading and there are some common first-line fails that seem to befall a lot of self-published novels. In this post, I’ll be showing you three of the best techniques for crafting perfect first lines - but first, let’s take a look at what you shouldn’tdo in your first line. The first line has to grab a potential reader’s attention and convince them that they need to buy your book and keep reading. It’s for that reason that I believe that the first line of your novel is more important now than it was twenty years ago. You may only get to preview a few pages of a novel but in my experience, that’s enough for me to know whether I’m going to enjoy the book or not. When I’m considering buying or downloading a book from an author I haven’t read before, I like to use Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. If you’re planning on publishing your novel, especially if you’re opting for self-publishing, then you’ve got some pretty fierce competition to get readers to choose yourbook over the thousands of others available. Each and every month, more than 200,000 books are published worldwide - or over 6,000 each day.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |