5 ms·

Most people stop reading something after the first few sentences. In that crucial 10 to 15 seconds, a book (or essay, or article, or blog post) has to make, and

Most people stop reading something after the first few sentences. In that crucial 10 to 15 seconds, a book (or essay, or article, or blog post) has to make, and win, a subconscious appeal to your attention. Your reader's attention span is like a snotty doorman at a hot club. Your opening sentence needs to grab his interest and sneak the rest of the piece into the door. Consider the following examples from fiction: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, 1984 "It was a pleasure to burn." --Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." --Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis Or these examples from nonfiction: "Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing flourescent tubes, the American market doesn't present itself as having very much to do with Nature." --Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma "I like to take my time when I pronounce someone dead." --Jane Churchon, "The Dead Book" "Out of nowhere I developed this lump." --David Sedaris, "Old Faithful" This is not to suggest that opening lines should be pure gimmickry, or that they should be conceived entirely apart from the rest of the piece itself. Provocation for provocation's sake is a game of diminishing returns. Rather, the opening line should immediately intrigue the reader by establishing a compelling tone -- one that the rest of the work will follow. Compelling does not necessarily mean brief, though in modern practice, the two are frequently corelated. That being said, some of the best opening lines in literary history are long and winding. The key is setting up intrigue, however many words that may take.

cynicalkane 14y ago
To my knowledge I don't know anyone who picks up novels, reads the first few sentences, then throws them away. Maybe people do this in airport bookstores, but I don't think Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Kafka wrote with the ADHD audience in mind. On the other hand I know that many readers hate to put a book down without giving it a fair shot. The "catchy opening" design pattern is present in a lot of art where the audience has almost no chance of leaving, like Beethoven's 5th Symphony, or that famous opening shot with the star destroyer in "Star Wars". It's an artistic effect. Conversely, the "Harry Potter" novels have a mundane, slow first few chapters, and they did pretty well.
- jonnathanson 14y ago
  "To my knowledge I don't know anyone who picks up novels, reads the first few sentences, then throws them away. Maybe people do this in airport bookstores, but I don't think Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Kafka wrote with the ADHD audience in mind." Browsing is (was?) incredibly common in the bookstore era, and will become even more so in the modern era and beyond. Especially as digital sampling becomes more prevalent, and as the barrier to entry (price) comes down significantly. If anything, we'll see even more buy-and-then-browse behavior. And for what it's worth, book returns were prevalent in the heyday of the B&M bookstore, and they're a significant factor in Amazon's business to this day. (In fact, I'm willing to wager that quite a few people, even the highly literate ones, haven't read the majority of the books sitting on their shelves.) Regardless, I'm not talking about the opening line as a sales proposition. I'm talking about the opening line as a gambit to get someone to keep reading when they first pick up the piece. How many times have you bought a book, or picked up a magazine, or clicked open a blog post, and simply lost interest after the opening paragraph? I'm not saying you immediately regret picking it up, but rather, that you think to yourself "Meh, I'll skip this one and read something else. Maybe I'll come back to it later." This behavior is pretty common, and by nature, the human attention span in limited. In no way am I talking about the "ADHD audience" here. I'm talking about basic human wiring. As for Kafka, Orwell, et al., bear in mind that their initial audience was a reader at a publishing house, journal, or newspaper. Oftentimes, your first target reader is the one who decides whether or not to publish you in the first place. This person reads thousands of pieces a week, and getting his or her attention has been a crucial task since the invention of the printing press.
  - kafkaesque 14y ago
    I think most novelists write with the intent to be read after they have some years of experience. It's the next, natural step. Whether that reader is at a publishing house or not is a little hard to know, especially in Kafka's case. From what I've read and studied at university, Kafka wrote for his friends a lot. He shared his writings with them and they had a laugh. His pieces were known (by his friends) as dark comedies. Whereas in Western Europe and North America, they are read as existential pieces. Kafka doubted many times that his novels and stories would ever be published because of their 'immoral' content. So, I'm interested in any further info you have that might suggest otherwise.
hdctambien 14y ago
Also consider: "It was a dark and stormy night" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C9p9mw62qB8/TsWPk2-GMcI/AAAAAAAACFM/ucMa83JwQLU/s1600/dark-and-stormy+2nd+sentence.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C9p9mw62qB8/TsWPk2-GMcI/AAAAAAAACF...
- ctdonath 14y ago
  Oh, you MUST visit http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
philh 14y ago
> "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, 1984 I think I've frequently heard this called a great opening line, and I've never worked out why. It doesn't tell me anything that I care about, it doesn't seem especially clever, and I don't notice myself having any other discernible emotional reaction to it. Can someone explain?
- to3m 14y ago
  Clocks don't generally strike thirteen. So, if nothing else, you might read on to find out what's going on. (This style of opening might have been a bit more cutting-edge in 1948, perhaps.)
- nagrom 14y ago
  It sets the scene really well: "A bright, cold day in April" is evocative of exactly that. It's not pretentious and it immediately puts a setting in the readers mind. "and the clocks were striking thirteen." is an immediate juxtaposition of something non-intuitive. The first reaction is "Clocks don't strike thirteen! They strike a maximum of twelve!". It's just nonintuitive enough without necessarily being obviously nonsense. And so the reader is engaged to read the next sentence to find out what he means by thirteen. Get the reader to read the next sentence enough, and you've tricked them into reading the book ;-)
  - philh 14y ago
    My first reaction is more like "okay, so it's one o'clock". I never really noticed that it was weird before, though now it's pointed out I can see that it is.
    - fastball 14y ago
      I think this opening line works better for people that don't use 24 hour time (namely Americans). That is interesting, because Orwell was British, and I am fairly certain that 24 hour time was adopted in Britain before 1948.
psykotic 14y ago
Those opening sentences have a particular kind of urgency. By contrast, the equally memorable openings of Lolita and Moby Dick could never be called urgent, but they do instantly establish an unusual first-person narrator. What they all share is density. If instead you want to fill up the page with ink while wasting the time of your readers, you start your book like Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities.
- pcrh 14y ago
  For the curious: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. and Call me Ishmael. and It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
- jonnathanson 14y ago
  The old joke about Dickens is that he got paid by the word, and he wrote accordingly. (There's probably some truth to it; he did serialize many of his novels, and was paid by the word for them. But he was paid very handsomely, and was considered something like his day's equivalent of John Grisham or Stephen King. It's doubtful he was seriously trying to nickel and dime his publishers by being verbose). That said, I quite enjoy that opening line. It's satirical and snarky, and it plays on the sort of common hyperbole that's still very prevalent in today's society.
  - psykotic 14y ago
    Dickens wrote many great sentences by my reckoning, but that one has always annoyed me. It is a workaday piece of prose that long overstays its welcome, finally admitting its own irrelevance to this or any other book. That punch line witticism is an insufficient excuse for its pride of place as a starting sentence.

cynicalkane 14y ago

To my knowledge I don't know anyone who picks up novels, reads the first few sentences, then throws them away. Maybe people do this in airport bookstores, but I don't think Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Kafka wrote with the ADHD audience in mind. On the other hand I know that many readers hate to put a book down without giving it a fair shot. The "catchy opening" design pattern is present in a lot of art where the audience has almost no chance of leaving, like Beethoven's 5th Symphony, or that famous opening shot with the star destroyer in "Star Wars". It's an artistic effect. Conversely, the "Harry Potter" novels have a mundane, slow first few chapters, and they did pretty well.

jonnathanson 14y ago
"To my knowledge I don't know anyone who picks up novels, reads the first few sentences, then throws them away. Maybe people do this in airport bookstores, but I don't think Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Kafka wrote with the ADHD audience in mind." Browsing is (was?) incredibly common in the bookstore era, and will become even more so in the modern era and beyond. Especially as digital sampling becomes more prevalent, and as the barrier to entry (price) comes down significantly. If anything, we'll see even more buy-and-then-browse behavior. And for what it's worth, book returns were prevalent in the heyday of the B&M bookstore, and they're a significant factor in Amazon's business to this day. (In fact, I'm willing to wager that quite a few people, even the highly literate ones, haven't read the majority of the books sitting on their shelves.) Regardless, I'm not talking about the opening line as a sales proposition. I'm talking about the opening line as a gambit to get someone to keep reading when they first pick up the piece. How many times have you bought a book, or picked up a magazine, or clicked open a blog post, and simply lost interest after the opening paragraph? I'm not saying you immediately regret picking it up, but rather, that you think to yourself "Meh, I'll skip this one and read something else. Maybe I'll come back to it later." This behavior is pretty common, and by nature, the human attention span in limited. In no way am I talking about the "ADHD audience" here. I'm talking about basic human wiring. As for Kafka, Orwell, et al., bear in mind that their initial audience was a reader at a publishing house, journal, or newspaper. Oftentimes, your first target reader is the one who decides whether or not to publish you in the first place. This person reads thousands of pieces a week, and getting his or her attention has been a crucial task since the invention of the printing press.
- kafkaesque 14y ago
  I think most novelists write with the intent to be read after they have some years of experience. It's the next, natural step. Whether that reader is at a publishing house or not is a little hard to know, especially in Kafka's case. From what I've read and studied at university, Kafka wrote for his friends a lot. He shared his writings with them and they had a laugh. His pieces were known (by his friends) as dark comedies. Whereas in Western Europe and North America, they are read as existential pieces. Kafka doubted many times that his novels and stories would ever be published because of their 'immoral' content. So, I'm interested in any further info you have that might suggest otherwise.

hdctambien 14y ago

Also consider: "It was a dark and stormy night" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C9p9mw62qB8/TsWPk2-GMcI/AAAAAAAACFM/ucMa83JwQLU/s1600/dark-and-stormy+2nd+sentence.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C9p9mw62qB8/TsWPk2-GMcI/AAAAAAAACF...

ctdonath 14y ago
Oh, you MUST visit http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

philh 14y ago

> "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --George Orwell, 1984 I think I've frequently heard this called a great opening line, and I've never worked out why. It doesn't tell me anything that I care about, it doesn't seem especially clever, and I don't notice myself having any other discernible emotional reaction to it. Can someone explain?

to3m 14y ago
Clocks don't generally strike thirteen. So, if nothing else, you might read on to find out what's going on. (This style of opening might have been a bit more cutting-edge in 1948, perhaps.)
nagrom 14y ago
It sets the scene really well: "A bright, cold day in April" is evocative of exactly that. It's not pretentious and it immediately puts a setting in the readers mind. "and the clocks were striking thirteen." is an immediate juxtaposition of something non-intuitive. The first reaction is "Clocks don't strike thirteen! They strike a maximum of twelve!". It's just nonintuitive enough without necessarily being obviously nonsense. And so the reader is engaged to read the next sentence to find out what he means by thirteen. Get the reader to read the next sentence enough, and you've tricked them into reading the book ;-)
- philh 14y ago
  My first reaction is more like "okay, so it's one o'clock". I never really noticed that it was weird before, though now it's pointed out I can see that it is.
  - fastball 14y ago
    I think this opening line works better for people that don't use 24 hour time (namely Americans). That is interesting, because Orwell was British, and I am fairly certain that 24 hour time was adopted in Britain before 1948.

psykotic 14y ago

Those opening sentences have a particular kind of urgency. By contrast, the equally memorable openings of Lolita and Moby Dick could never be called urgent, but they do instantly establish an unusual first-person narrator. What they all share is density. If instead you want to fill up the page with ink while wasting the time of your readers, you start your book like Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities.

pcrh 14y ago
For the curious: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. and Call me Ishmael. and It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
jonnathanson 14y ago
The old joke about Dickens is that he got paid by the word, and he wrote accordingly. (There's probably some truth to it; he did serialize many of his novels, and was paid by the word for them. But he was paid very handsomely, and was considered something like his day's equivalent of John Grisham or Stephen King. It's doubtful he was seriously trying to nickel and dime his publishers by being verbose). That said, I quite enjoy that opening line. It's satirical and snarky, and it plays on the sort of common hyperbole that's still very prevalent in today's society.
- psykotic 14y ago
  Dickens wrote many great sentences by my reckoning, but that one has always annoyed me. It is a workaday piece of prose that long overstays its welcome, finally admitting its own irrelevance to this or any other book. That punch line witticism is an insufficient excuse for its pride of place as a starting sentence.