19 ms·
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
by NickM 8y ago
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.
- nfoz 8y agoReminds me of this: http://bulwer-lytton.com/ http://bulwer-lytton.com/ "The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."
- smrq 8y agoAnd, in a similar but shorter-winded vein, the Lyttle Lytton: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
- volkk 8y agothat's why judging a book by one page is basically impossible and will never actually become popular aside from a fun little project
- jrumbut 8y agoI 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.
- alleyshack 8y agoIn 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.
- Swizec 8y agoMy forever favorite opening line to a novel remains “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold” How can you not want to keep reading after that? While at the same time it’s still at the beginning, not assaulting you with action, etc
- IneffablePigeon 8y agoSomething 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).
- singingboyo 8y agoIn 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.
- JKCalhoun 8y ago"She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah..."
- slededit 8y agoThe radio edit. It's not just for bleeping out swear words.
- hinkley 8y agoPink 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...
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoPeople 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]. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/star-wars-the-last-jedi-amc-warning-silent-scene-1202648766/ https://variety.com/2017/film/news/star-wars-the-last-jedi-a...
- blocked_again 8y agoAmazon already does this. They allow you to download first n pages of as an ebook for free.
- xutopia 8y agoIt's not the same thing. On amazon you judge a book by its cover. On this site you judge it by its content
- blocked_again 8y agoYou are judging the book on the basis of a page here. Not much different from judging the book on basis of the cover.
- amp108 8y agoThe 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.
- vadansky 8y agoA lot of young adult novels used to do it, and it turned me off books for long time as a kid. It felt like it was pandering to idiots.
- nullgeo 8y agoLooks like it's already happening. I see that some books are "promoted".
- hinkley 8y agoMy 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.
- wrycoder 8y agoMy way is to skim the book backwards. Keeps you from getting hooked by the narrative. You can decide in a few seconds whether it’s worth reading.
- jonahx 8y agoGoodhart's Law: > "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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- dspig 8y agoDon't authors already put a lot of effort into the first line/paragraph/page?
- skookumchuck 8y agoThe smart ones do. The same goes for emails, advertising copy, blogs, abstracts, elevator pitches, etc. Movies do it, too.
- rapfaria 8y agoWhy though? Is there something relating overall quality to first line engagement? "The primroses were over" does nothing for me, but Watership Down is great!
- skookumchuck 8y agoBecause people are deluged with information and need a good reason to invest the time looking past the beginning.
- morganvachon 8y agoMy 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. [1] https://jessicasreadingroom.com/ https://jessicasreadingroom.com/
- mirimir 8y agoRight. First few sentences: 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."
- jen729w 8y agoWell, that worked! Just reserved The Quantum Thief at the library.
- mirimir 8y agoI love his stuff. He creates an amazing world. Similar to Sterling and early Stross, but a very different path.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoMy 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."
- jlarocco 8y agoHaven't people always read the first few pages when picking out books? It's even built into Amazon's "Look Inside This Book".
- tristanho 8y agoThis 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).
- wrycoder 8y ago“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
- cm2187 8y agoEditors 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.