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#WritersCoffeeClub 3/2 How accurately does the first line represent your style and voice?
"Skuld's salad days as a suicide bomber came to an end after her eighth successful mission, when she awakened in the reincarnation tank with orders to pursue a career in academia."
Current work-in-progress.
It's both a hook … and an indicator that we're about to dive into a science fictional take on the academic novel. (With assassins disguised as faculty wives.)
@cstross So this first sentence is essentially an elevator pitch.
@jzillw It's INCREASINGLY important to hook your reader's attention fast. Used to be you had a page to grab them, but current wisdom is that you do it in the first paragraph, or ideally the opening sentence. So I optimize my openings like crazy.
@cstross Sounds tough. In video games (specifically the PC/console segment) the rule of thumb is you have 15 minutes. The elevator pitch is just for the publisher. I guess it helps that video games have (moving) pictures.
@jzillw Proficient readers—your normative customer for novel-length prose fiction—read at roughly 330 words per minute. Which is just under a page. By the end of that minute your reader has to be invested enough to read *the next* page, or you've lost them. Books are cheap (compared to computer games or movies), so they go back on the shelf and the reader starts another one.
@Wolf_Baginski @jzillw No, the need for a rapid hook goes back decades. (Re-read the first para of "Singularity Sky" some time? Or the first page of "The Stainless Steel Rat", from the early 1960s.)
@cstross @Wolf_Baginski @jzillw I was thinking of Banks’ The Crow Road. I haven’t read it yet, but I know the 1st line.
@Wolf_Baginski @cstross @jzillw "in medias res" is such an old concept that it's named in Latin.
There are many literary and rhetorical devices which are that old. Why is this one so dominant now?
@Wolf_Baginski @cstross @jzillw The population (i.e. the reading public) is ageing. Middle-aged people have less patience for things that take forever to get started, maybe?
