From: mdhangton@gmail.com
Dorothy J Heydt laid this down on his screen :
> In article ,
> William Vetter wrote:
>> Dorothy J Heydt was thinking very hard :
>>> In article ,
>>> William Vetter wrote:
>>>> It happens that J.Pascal formulated :
>>>>> On Saturday, November 22, 2014 1:44:48 PM UTC-7, William Vetter wrote:
>>>>>> Some time ago, I read one of those books...this one was about openings.
>>>>>> It's thesis was the belief that it is possible to write an opening so
>>>>>> strong, that editors, literary agents, readers, publishing executives
>>>>>> are compelled to read on. One of the examples mentioned the
>>>>>> assassination of JFK in the first sentence. Author claimed that this
>>>>>> made it so interesting that people MUST read it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What I thought was that, "There are a lot of books about JFK. Why
>>>>>> should I read this one?"
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Of course, we want to be interesting, the get the quality of being
>>>>>> interesting. What do you think makes a fragment or piece of writing
>>>>>> interesting?
>>>>>
>>>>> I think it's different for different people.
>>>>>
>>>>> Your example is a good one. Lots of people would think, Oh, JFK again?
>>>>> Yawn.
>>>>>
>>>>> "The first time I died I..." might get an, Oh! More!, or else it might
>>>>> get, Ew, gimmick much? Or else, yawn, vampire, right?
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't think that the question itself, of how to craft that one
>>>>> beginning that is so strong that no one can put it down, is particularly
>>>>> valid. Obviously the creature does not exist. I think that it might be
>>>>> more useful to think in terms of who am I writing for and how do I get
>>>>> my audience not to set the book down. If my audience begins and ends
>>>>> at "agent, publisher's slush reader and Editor" that's a particular
>>>>> challenge, and frankly the only one that doesn't have cover art to help
>>>>> you out.
>>>>>
>>>> Once I read a short story in one of the 4 magazines. I only remember
>>>> the opening. It was one of those flash forward openings. A character
>>>> shot another character's Roman nose off with a pistol because the nose
>>>> annoyed him. I remember it because it was obvious as a hook.
>>>>
>>>> Was it interesting? Maybe. It was violent action.
>>>
>>> I think I would've closed the book, or paged through the
>>> magazine, at that point, and my reaction would've been not Yawn
>>> but Yucch.
>>
>> I don't remember what or who it was, but it was in F&SF around 1980.
>> What I was getting at is you can often see where somebody equates raw
>> violence or action or grisly crime scene descriptions with the concept
>> of hook.
>
> Lawrence Block, who back in the day wrote lots of whodunits and
> also wrote a monthly essay for one of the writers' magazines on
> how to write fiction (generally, everything else in the book was
> about how to write nonfiction and how to sell it to the editor
> before you had written it). One of his essays was titled "Let's
> Hear It for Sex and Violence!" He gave a couple of sample
> paragraphs full of sex and violence, and then said, "You'd go on
> reading, wouldn't you?" No, I wouldn't.
A lot of detective novels open with some grisly crime scene. They blur
together for me; the only one that stands out to me is one from a book
by Martin Cruz Smith, a sequel to _Gorky Park_, it might have been
_Havana Bay_. It was a Russian burned up in his car. The car was a
bank on wheels, the financial records being stored in a PC in the
victim's car. The image I remember is all the diskettes being melted
into a lump, with the metal shutters sticking out of it. What I mean
is that all the death-rictus corpses in all those novels were never
really memorable.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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