It's interesting to think what might happen if something like this became really popular. I'd imagine many novels might start adding super oddball stuff in the first page, just to stand out from the crowd and pique peoples' curiosity. Kind of the literary equivalent to clickbait headlines.
Something similar has happened in pop music - because on Spotify (and probably other streaming services, too) a play counts if you listen to at least 30 seconds, there's been a definite shift towards songs that start off with a pared down version of the main hook, or at least start their build much more obviously early on. There's fewer long, drawn out intros (which are normally saved just for videos now).
In fairness, wasn't this also true for radio? I recall quite a number of songs where the full version (from a CD or similar) had an intro that I'd never hear on the radio.
Pink Floyd, for one, released a couple of songs with very quiet intros. If you played the album versions people would think you were broadcasting dead air. Can’t have that. So just jump to the first sound over a certain decibel, and chop out anything longer than a second later in the song.
Which makes that Alannis Morisette song where she’s making a point about people not being able to handle silence pretty weird. The on air version has an “uncomfortable silence” that’s only around a second long...
People have short attention spans. Theaters had to post warnings for the last Star Wars film that it had several intentional seconds of silence, because people thought the movie must be broken[0].
I saw that warning in the projectionist area, so projectionists didn't think the system was malfunctioning, phrased similarly to the one in that article. I wonder if those theatres just put the sign in the wrong place, or thought it was supposed to be public when it wasn't.
Crews-Offerman in 2020, with Offerman spearheading a War on Boredom that is just him insisting everybody should grow the fuck up and be able to sit quietly for at least 10 seconds at a time.
I think this might already happen. This is just anecdata but I often get turned off from books by overwrought first page(s). Eventually someone convines me to go back and the rest of the novel is good.
I'd love to hear an author's perspective on this, if any of them notice it. My guess is that they stew on opening passages for years before writing, causing them to get a little neurotic about them, then eventually they settle down and write in a way that comes more naturally to them for the rest of the book.
In pretty much any writing medium (novels, screenplays, short stories, etc), standard advice involves hooking the reader within the first paragraph or so. This is partly why "in medias res" tends to be such a popular opening technique - it drops the reader straight into the action, which is theoretically more interesting than "She woke up, got dressed, and went downstairs for her daily breakfast of toast and juice...". However, starting in medias res has itself become something of a cliche, to the point where you have to really know what you're doing to be able to use it effectively.
What I think a lot of novice writers, and people giving advice to novice writers, often miss is that "hooking" your reader doesn't mean immediately assualting them with action. All it means is raising a question the reader wants to know the answer to.
For example, "The Wizard Hunters" opens with the line "It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door." Not much action - Tremaine is sitting in a dusty library reading books - but that line raises two immediate questions: 1, why is Tremaine trying to kill herself in a way that would be ruled "natural causes", and 2, who's banging on the door at 9pm?
Similarly, "Black Sun Rising", the first book of the Coldfire Trilogy, opens with the line "She wondered why she was afraid to go home." Again, the line raises multiple questions, inviting the reader to keep reading to learn the answers.
Interesting article, and I believe I have a better translation: "Today, my mom died." It sounds better than just "mom" and seems to express the right level of closeness.
OTOH I think it's often appropriate to keep "mamma" in Italian movies and texts because it carries a huge amount of connotations, which "maman" doesn't.
“Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream”
A great example of "in media res" mildly weirdly implemented is the beginning of the second "Sin City" movie, wherein Marv wakes up next to a crashed cop car and some other vehicle, asking "how did I get here?" It's a weird implementation because it immediately goes into a flashback, but I wouldn't say it's a "poor" implementation because the effect is the viewer is introduced to Marv's memory issues.
Writer's perspective - starting and ending a book are the top 2 hardest things, in my opinion, especially because editors get all up your ass about beginnings. I suspect this has to do with primacy principle, i.e.the editor is "most aware" during the beginning of the reading, and also aware that readers do the same thing. They will pick up the book in the bookstore and possibly skim the beginning to see if they should buy, so you gotta hook.
Other things I find difficult about writing:
Ending chapters (I saw a really bad one once in the Broken Earth trilogy that was basically "[character] realized she had nothing more to say, so she walked away." I totally understood how the author got herself in that situation lol)
Making decisions on tropes. For example, say I'm writing a sci fi with a "rise of the machines" plot point (I am). What is the nature of those machines? Rampant AI in existent technology? Did it make war-bots? Or maybe multiple rampant AIs in autonomous bots? Etc. There's like fifty of these kinds of decisions I need to make in a book I'm working on now.
Writing dialogue that's interesting, but not campy, but realistic, but not drab.
Crystal’s character has writers block because he is fixated on a good first sentence setting the tone for the rest of the novel, and he never gets past line one.
Stover's Caine's Law starts with an author's note: "Several parts of this story take place before the events depicted in Act of Atonement Book 1: Caine Black Knife. Other parts of this story take place after. Still other parts take place before and after both. Some parts may be imaginary, and some were real only temporarily, as they have subsequently unhappened."
That must have been driven by comments from initial readers, I suspect. Basically, some of the characters are rewriting the overall story of the series.
I do this too, and my wife thinks I'm insane. But I'm not really trying to judge if the book is good or bad. I just want to know if it's good. And there are more good books with good first few pages than I'll be able to read in my lifetime, so I don't really lose a lot by accidentally not reading a good book with bad first pages. On the other hand, by accepting bad first pages I risk having to suffer a whole bad book!
> then eventually they settle down and write in a way that comes more naturally to them for the rest of the book.
In game development, often you'll start with a random level from early-mid game, since that lets you playtest all of the gameplay. You then work forwards and return to the opening levels once the gameplay, art style etc. are all locked in and polished.
I wonder if some writers would benefit from a similar approach?
> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[1] One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions which alter its outcome.
"The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."
Morgan's Steel Remains: "When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic questions."
Stephenson's Seveneves: "The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."
Lawrence's Prince of Thorns: "Ravens! Always the ravens. They settled on the gables of the church even before the injured became the dead."
Stover's Caine's Law: "And in this My Dream, Beloved, you know Me. Through your eyes I watch your blunt and broken hands scrabble upon the marble stair: spiders maimed and bleeding on frosted glass."
Scalzi's Old Man's War: "I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army."
Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief: "As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk."
My all-time favorite opening line is from Spider Robinson's Lady Slings the Booze: "It was noon before they finished scraping Uncle Ernie off the dining room table."
My friend in college would read a random page from the first third of the book to make his decision. He found the first page to be too unreliable.
My roommate would read the last page of the book to find out if the book was worth his time. We thought he was nuts. Especially since he could read a novel in 3 hours anyway.
“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”
— Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner
This is actually largely already true for ebooks! The "Send a Free Sample" button on amazon.com for Kindle simulates this behavior (although you get a bit more than a page, and you obviously know which book you're reading).
My wife, who runs a book review blog[1] in her spare time, has a popular feature called "First Line Friday" where she features the first line of a book from her collection or her co-contributors', as a way to pique interest in the book among her followers. I sent her the link to this service just now and she loved it. She said it will be a great source for first lines for books she doesn't have but wants to feature.
Editors are known to only read the first few pages to make a decision on whether they even want to spend any time on a manuscript. The first pages of the book who survived going through an editor are designed to achieve that already.
The two are very different. A book is mostly prose, in black and white, by the author. A cover is graphic design elements (and even the text is treated as a design element on the cover), most often in color, created by someone else.
I kept hearing raving reviews of "The Name of the Wind". I started reading it and got a couple of chapters in and had no interest in continuing. I mentioned this to my brother and he told me that I had to keep going. So I figured I'd read a bit more and see if there was anything to the book. I just finished it on Saturday and I have to say it is easily one of the best books I have ever read. But, if I had just read the first pages of the book I never would have been hooked.
I felt pretty much the same way when reading it. "The Name of the Wind" is rather unusual as a novel because those first chapters are pretty fundamentally different than the rest of the novel. Not just in terms of plot, but I think also the general tone and style. I don't actually have a count, but I think it's a good 50-100 pages before the novel falls into its rhythm. It's not that the beginning is bad (in my opinion, obviously) it's just that there's a lot to set up and he does so without using a bunch of exposition.
That's really interesting. The first few pages come pretty close to poetry in my opinion.
For me its those interludes that raise TNOTW into a class above the normal Harry Potter Copycat Formula that is so popular now.
I never even considered the possibility that, those bits would be putting people off. It's pretty clear that its those sections were Patrick Ruthfuss strives for perfection, that is taking so long to complete the series. He can churn out pages, once he gets "into the rythm" of more common storytelling.
I should add that I like the other interludes, and now when I re-read that first part I enjoy it. It's just the initial reading of the set up, introducing Chronicler, the stuff with the scrael, etc. I didn't know where Ruthfuss was taking this.
"And, well, I thought. If I have to carry the damn thing, I might as well read it. So I started reading, and there, on page four—of a book that started on page three, mind you, were five bowls of stew."
Absolutely agree and notice a slight pattern with fantasy novels starting with overdone "spooky monster in the woods" setting before getting into anything interesting (like characters and plot). The opening to Game of Thrones is the same. I have to imagine it's their editors asking for something more generically sell-able.
I think it's something different in A Game of Thrones, and it was a deliberate decision of the author. I imagine him going "you see, this opens like the typical fantasy novel, there's some dudes who are likely the heroes or related to them, and there's some monster, and this novel is going to be about them"... and then BAM! -- all those tropes are subverted. The novel is largely about something else, and these were not only not the heroes, but they weren't even important characters!
I think opening "prologue" scenes like this are mostly about priming the audience's expectations. Movies do this too; the story of The Matrix begins with Neo working as a corporate drone, but the opening scene is an action sequence with Trinity getting chased by a police as a promise of things to come. There's value in letting the audience know what kind of story they're in for, especially if you're planning on taking awhile to get there.
Notably, these kinds of scenes aren't there to sell the audience a false bill of goods. Quite the opposite, in fact: the first few chapters of a story aren't always representative of the whole, hence the addition of a prologue to give the audience a sense of what's to come in later chapters.
As an example of what can happen when an author doesn't do this, Dan Wells' I Am Not A Serial Killer is about a teenager who works in a mortuary and investigates a series of brutal deaths around his town, and discovers that the killer is actually a millennia-old monster. The supernatural reveal doesn't happen until halfway through the book, and if you go on Amazon and sort by 1-star reviews, you'll find a lot of them come from people who thought they were reading a crime story and then got upset when they discovered they were reading a paranormal YA novel. When it came time to publish Wells' next book, his publisher told him, "This time, we're putting the monster on the cover of the book."
Reminds me of "100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories" edited by Asimov. The format works really well for hard sci-fi, gets straight to the point. Some of them have stuck with me for decades.
I've looked up "Microcosmic God" several times because I can't seem to remember the title. But the story was particularly memorable. It wasn't in this Asimov anthology but it was published in the SF Hall of Fame.
A quick search reveals that someone has a copy of the text freely (but perhaps not legitimately) available.
It's funny that most of these that I read start off with a very annoying, cliched "writer" tone.
I've always had the impression that authors just can't help buy try to prove how clever they are in the first paragraph at the expense of making the story compelling. It's like everyone has delusions that the book they're writing is going to be the next Moby Dick, so that beginning must be literary dammit.
I don't know which specific novels you're referring to, but the first sentence/paragraph/chapter of a novel often need to have a different tone from the rest. The opening of a novel sets the scene and sets the tone and raises expectations for the rest of the story in a way that a strictly narrative opening wouldn't. In other words, these "literary"-style openings are no more and no less clichéd than any other.
Very often it's more that people struggle to find a way to start a story. In much the same way that students use cliche'd academic speak in the introductions to their essays. It's not a pose, it's a crutch.
This promoted me to write a first page of a new book idea. Was trying to write just the first page that would have gotten me curious enough to want more.
I’d love if there was a similar website but instead of existing books it will have new book ideas. Authors will just write the first page and by votes (or donations) get encouraged to write more. Like Reddit’s writing prompts but more organized. Maybe it will be my next weekend project...
There are a number of sites where people post serial fiction as it's written, chapter by chapter, and many popular web serials began with opening chapters of around 500-2000 words (2-8 pages). These sites usually offer writers validation in the form of likes or star ratings, a view counter, and comments from readers (who will often respond with short affirming messages like "looking forward to chapter 2" or speculation about where the story might be headed).
Royal Road is one of the newer and faster-growing sites, notable for being the biggest home of free LitRPG stories. Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a site mainly for fan works, though there are a number of people posting original fiction there. AO3 is currently a closed site with a queue to get in (most stories can be read by anyone, but an account is required to post), there's usually a waiting period of around 10 days after you submit your email address to the waiting list.
There are also some forum-style sites like Sufficient Velocity (and its progenitor Spacebattles), where the forum software allows authors to "threadmark" certain posts in a thread and label them as chapters to separate them from the posts that are discussions/comments. Readers can choose between "Reader mode" (which just displays the posts that have been labeled as chapters by the original poster) or a regular forum mode (where they can see all of the comments from other posters between chapters). Although this forum-based approach might make it feel like it's less optimized for sharing stories (as opposed to sites that are tailored specifically to that purpose), I've found that the forum setting makes people much more likely to comment on stories. While these forum-based websites might not have the biggest audiences, they certainly seem to have the most engaged audiences, which I think makes them more valuable if you're looking to validate a story idea.
> [...] website but instead of existing books it will have new book ideas. Authors will just write the first page [...]
I'd prefer an outline as the first page isn't enough. Maybe with some parts of the outline marked as spoiler. I just started keeping a couple story ideas as issues in a repo[0], but they don't come to me as often as software ideas.
Great idea. I noticed that the right arrow key works great for quickly skipping a book I don't like, but if I accidentally push it there's no way to go back (back button and left arrow key don't work at all)
Some novels have powerful first pages and even opening paragraphs. However, one distinction (of many) between the novel and the short story is that the short story must hook your attention from the first paragraph, whereas a novel has the time and space to grow on you.
I'm not sure this will work for novels. As an example, I got the first page of a book which talked about a middle-aged man and his relationship with a prostitute. I was surprised to find out the book was Coetzee's "Disgrace" -- a book I've read and which I do not associate at all with a middle-aged man and his affection for a prostitute. I really don't think you can decide whether you'll like a novel -- or even find out its main themes -- in the first few pages.
I think this approach can successfully work for short stories, though. Short stories have no time to waste; they must both engage the reader and their themes in the first few paragraphs.
...but then again, do you really need a recommendation to read a short story? You might just as well read it and get it over with :)
That may not work for all (I want to say most) of literature. Many books I like are pretty dry. These books are theme based and not story based where you don't really care how the story ends, but are more interested in the deep conversations between characters which are spread throughout the book which may not show up in the first few pages. The author uses the first few pages to describe the settings and make you more comfortable with the times and the environment the book is based on. You may not really be interested in those parts but subconsciously they help you out throughout the book and lead to a more immersive experience. This is what separates films from movies too. I'm sure even fast paced fiction (say thriller) writers would take their time in setting up a universe for the reader. You don't really remember the details described in each line but the approximate picture is enough to get you 'into the zone'.
If you live in SF, go to the Booksmith on Haight street and look up on the walls on the left side of the store. They have the first line of many famous novels, printed without context. I was shocked at how many I knew, even though if it had been posed to me in reverse (How does {book x} begin?) I would have had no idea.
I'm not even a very attentive reader, but I guess some of these really great opening lines will stick with you forever.
Two of my favorites:
* "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.”
* “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.”
My father's rule is to only read by opening books (new, old, known, unknown, already read, halfway read) randomly and just plowing through that random part of the book. I don't think I would personally enjoy that constant destructuration but it help get a global vision of many books fast.
Like all other shortcuts for judging a book this one has plenty of issues. However I like that it disentangles a few of those issues. Instead of judging a book by the author, cover, title and then the first page you can focus in on just one of those heuristics.
Also if you can control yourself and avoid revealing the author/title of books you don't like you won't bias yourself when you get recommendations from friends!
This is actually how I select books in a book shop. I admit I was ruined by all things tech with very limited attention span. In fact I only read the first paragraph over about a dozen books on the website and finally decided on one which turned out to be The hitchhacker's guide to the galaxy.
My suggestion here is not necessarily putting out the first page but a page the author feels most representative of the story/view/idea. Personally I would either draw to a unique plot or some really smooth/beautiful verse. In both scenarios, I don't think the first page may necessarily be representative enough, leaving me the shame of missing a damn good book.
Very cool! I find myself skipping the vast majority of books on kindle because the blurbs make them sound awful to me, but I admit I'd probably also have skipped a lot of books I really liked had I judged them that way. Also this seems like a good way to find books I wouldn't normally consider sampling just because of laziness and prejudice on my part.
Use this in conjunction with the Library Extension so that when you click the Amazon link, you find out whether it's also in your local public library!
Some really good books can be quite a struggle to read until you get past the first 100 pages. I even found Anathem by Neal Stephenson to be a struggle until I got past 200 pages, but after that it was so worth it.
You can still find new things that way. I get all kinds of recommendations on Netflix that I wouldn't have found on my own, but they still have high odds I will like them. And then not have to read through a dozen that are of no interest before you finally find a good one.
Search engines and browsers are quickly headed towards essentially requiring HTTPS. So probably want it from that stand point.
And, first thing I can think of is affiliate links. The site is all affiliate links, but I can just MITM it and just sub in my own number and get credit.
