Journal BarbaraHudson's Journal: 50 words or less? 10
When you give a speech, you tell your audience what you're gonna tell them (intro), tell them (body), and then tell them what you told them (summary). Story-telling (and here I include both fiction and non-fiction) used to also take the same long process to set the reader up. Using one or more chapters to do a mis-en-scene is unforgivable today.
- 1. Get the reader's attention in 50 words or less (your opening paragraph) with one of your main points. It should pose enough questions that the reader wants to read the rest of the page;
- 2. Make sure there's enough meat on the rest of the page to get them to want to finish off the first chapter;
- 3. If they finish the first chapter, you've got a chance to get them to read the rest.
Example first para (49 words):
[Redacted] and I were standing in the kitchen; he behind his father, who was seated at the table eating a sandwich, and me in front of the table. [Redacted] had a dish towel in his hands, and was making motions for me to "do it" - to kill his father.
Notes:
The use of the first person makes the text more immediate. People more closely identify with first-person stories.
There's no time wasted in fleshing out the characters or setting up the scene. That can come later, as needed.
The reader is told within the first 50 words that something important / bad / serious is going on - and what that something is.
The dish towel? It plays a part.
So, what happens / happened next?
Not always (Score:2)
Depends on what the goal of the author is, and the length of the work. Not a place for a hard and fast rule.
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Watch any TV drama today ('cuz they're certainly aware that they're competing with all media for attention) and you'll see that more often than not the terr'rists / dead bodies / explosion / spy / other threat or whatever is introduced even before the opening credits. They've taken the news caster's formula of "if it bleeds, it leads" to the logical conclusion, and it works.
The goal of many (maybe most) authors it to create an impression, evoke some response in the reader, maybe make them a bit uncomforta
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those pretentious not-to-be-touched hipster coffee-table books.
Reminds me, my sis's in-laws are those certain kinds of people who wallpaper their small homes with dusty old bookshelves and books, of wildly varying, esoteric topics.
What will today's hipster youth do when they're older to peacock (yes, I just verbized that) their bohemianness or whatever.
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Great invention! There's nothing wrong with "to peacock" - it gets the idea across perfectly.
But they'll probably be too busy peacocking all the paper cuts they got from feeling around trying to find their paper-thin iPhone 25 or Nexxus 87 :-)
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But books and movies are completely different. If "Mars, Ho!" were a screenplay, it would have to be written completely differently. If it were a movie, the opening scene would be the withdrawing addict killing the bouncer. In the book, this shows up halfway through.
Movies are completely passive, you're spoon-fed everything in a movie. With literature, it's almost as much the reader's imagination as the writer's. It would be a boring book indeed that described every aspect of everything.
In a movie, everyone
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I was hoping you'd chime in :-)
As you point out, the beauty of the written word is that it evokes the readers' imagination. The reader becomes involved in invoking the story, rather than being a passive consumer.
If it were a movie, the opening scene would be the withdrawing addict killing the bouncer. In the book, this shows up halfway through.
If the killing of the bouncer could be the natural beginning of, say, another story, would you lead with it?
I'm not arguing against "real books." I love being able to read them again. But at the same time, I know that the convenience factor is going to only get bigger with time, and that econ
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I don't know that I would categorize movies as 'spoon feeding' the audience. Maybe you need to find better movies:)
But what I will say is that there exist different media for different purposes.
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What I meant is that even though movies can indeed be thought-provoking, they demand no imagination on the audience's part.
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Agreed. With "Nobots" you had to get a few chapters read before it starts to make sense, but a woman who read it told me "it usually takes a chapter or two to get me sucked into a book, I was hooked on that one in the first paragraph."
OTOH "Mars, Ho!" has a Mise en scene (which slashdot's lack of unicode prevents us from easily spelling correctly), its first chapter. Different stories take different approaches.