Writing Gooder

Working on a story?  Having trouble with the first line?  The opening line is often the beginning of the hook, and thus very important.  You don’t want a common line, of course…that’s boring right away.  But do you want something short?  Something long?  Something awkward or elusive? 

Check out these 100 Best First Novel Lines.  Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

Kurt Vonnegut put together 8 basics to his works while writing amazing works like Slaughterhouse Five.  I read over these and some are very agreeable for short stories.  However, you don’t have to follow all of them to make an amazing story (just ask Flannery O’Connor).  And we all know, as writers, that our goal is to break all the rules in new and exciting ways!  But, here they are!

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Get the creative juices flowing! 

 This site gives you one word, and you have 60 seconds to write whatever you can about it.  Speed writing?  Yes.  Then…it becomes an entry into a contest!  Although….I have yet to figure out what contest and who runs it and what you win…that part seems rather unmentioned.  But, it’s still fun!

Try it here.

Although this generator is not as fun and random as the YWS generator…it has some pretty good ideas!

 The story starts when your protagonist hires a lawyer.

Another character is a meterologist who is sensitive to others’ auras.

Try it out here: Plot Scenario Generator

The scheduled maintenance is just about over with even as I write up this post.  The blog has been available now for quite some time, and the only thing holding the main site back is just restoring the immensity of the database.

Expect everything to be back up and running soon again though.

 

J.K. Rowling is currently involved in a legal battle with regards to an unauthorized encyclopedia of her Harry Potter novels.  While the case won’t be decided for weeks, this comment from the Judge is certainly interesting:

District Judge Robert Patterson Jr said that he had read the first half of the first Harry Potter novel to his grandchildren, but found the “magical world hard to follow, filled with strange names and words that would be gibberish in any other context.

“I found it extremely complex,” he said, suggesting that a reference guide might be useful.

Personally, I don’t think Rowling has a case (unauthorized reference guides of anything are in abundance), and the Judge is right that Harry Potter is gibberish in any other context.

However, when this story was picked up, it got misreported.  The judge says nowhere that Harry Potter is gibberish; just that words like boggart and floo powder mean nothing outside of the books so a reference guide would be helpful.

But going along with the misreporting, what do you think of the literary quality of Harry Potter?

From the Financial Times:

The campaign, backed by the Arts Council and other worthies, recently clucked that Britain’s adults were too hard on their kids for not doing enough “proper reading”.

Of course British teenagers were reading, the campaign insisted: Heat magazine, online song lyrics, internet sites that helped you cheat at computer games. Reading was not only about books. “It is these narrow definitions of what constitutes reading that is unwittingly turning off the next generation of avid readers,” the campaign said. I bet it is not just Zimbabwean parents who feel an urge to slap coming on.

It is not all bad news. Below the celebrity magazines, some authors featured in the UK teenagers’ top 10 reads: J.K. Rowling, of course, and Anne Frank (there was also a “fed-up” list in which, mysteriously, the Financial Times came 10th, after homework and Shakespeare).

Every generation of adults grumbles about the illiteracy of youth, but surely not this much? A lecturer at an unnamed British university recently described an orientation course for new students. Hoping to cover bibliographies, the lecturer instead had to explain that essays had introductions, bodies and conclusions.

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I thought that this was a good quote:

“‘Someone said if you take too much from one person, you’re stealing, but if you take a bit from a lot of people, it’s research.”

I can’t find the original source of the quote, so if you know, leave it in the comments.

The following story, entitled Walter and Winnie, was published sometime in the 19th century by an unknown author. It’s roughly 450 words long, and after you read it once, try reading it again three times fast.

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