I remember hearing something on the Writing Excuses podcast years ago about making the reader a promise at the opening of your book. This is an implied/inferred thing as to what the reader can expect from the story. The main thrust of it was that if you make promise x at the beginning, you have to deliver on it.
Lately feedback and rumination have made me consider the issue of trust, too, which seems to go hand in hand with the promise.
When I’ve had feedback on some of my stories, it’s been clear that on some occasions the reader hasn’t trusted me. Therefore, when I’ve done things a little unorthodox, left-field, or intentionally paired words that wouldn’t normally go together (no, I don’t mean I’m incoherent), they’ve sometimes been picked up on, and questioned. Part of this — good and bad — you can put down to the reader’s preferences and expectations, and also their knowledge of you.
Trust in an author is something that a reader who doesn’t know you can’t have. Say you have a raft of books published by Tor, the issue then becomes moot, I suppose, but none of us here have that, so I’ll discount it. When someone reads the opening to your book not only do you have to hook them with that aforementioned promise, you have to make them feel safe in your hands. Reading a book is for some an onerous undertaking - Kindle estimates can be between 4-9 hours depending on the book size - and no one is going to give you that much of their life if they don’t trust you.
But the thing is, trust is a nebulous thing when it comes to getting it. I’ve lately been picking up books by self-pubbed authors, or indie/small presses, and I have to say, the democratisation of publishing has made it far harder to invest trust in a lot of them. As I’m a completist, once I start a book, I have to finish it, and sometimes — sometimes — the author who I’ve not trusted does a great job, and by the end of the novel I see the need to have read it in its entirety before deciding whether it would be any good or not. But we don’t have that luxury; not everyone who picks up our story is a completist, and if they don’t like it, they won’t finish it.
However, with some of these new authors (and ones who are established but I’ve not heard of), I’ve felt ‘safe’ in their hands within the opening paragraph. It’s something that just comes, that I can’t pinpoint, or define.
For me I can identify things that give me trust in the opening lines or paragraph etc, but I wonder what you’d add to this list?
1) A smart opening line:
Is “Call me Ishmael” really a stonkingly good opening line? No. Neither is “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” Not in themselves anyway. A smart line is more like George Orwell’s one about 13 o’clock, or Douglas Adams’ one about the creation of the universe. What is it that has Moby Dick's or The Gunslinger's line lauded, then? If I pick up a book with an intriguing or smart first line, I’m pretty much sold.
If someone posted in Crits here, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” how many people would have replied, ‘You’re telling, not showing.’ Not to compare ourselves with Dickens, but what makes the line permissible? And here I’m a hypocrite because Daphne Du Maurier’s “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” just holds so much, it's so evocative, when really it isn’t; and dreams are such a hum-drum trope, I wonder why it strikes a chord with me and gives me so much trust.
2) A lyrical or arresting image:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” is a short, concise one from Zora Neale Hurston that you can’t help but love and infer an entire story from. I suppose the Pride and Prejudice opening is well-crafted and might fall into this category, although I suspect it’s more category No. 1.
Without a doubt, my favourite every opening to any book ever, ever, ever is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s smart and gives you total trust in her skills:
And on that, it’s strange to me because I find these kind of openings far more commonly in horror and weird fiction than in anything else I read. Of course horrors roots lie in literary fiction so it makes a certain degree of sense, but…
What are your thoughts?
Lately feedback and rumination have made me consider the issue of trust, too, which seems to go hand in hand with the promise.
When I’ve had feedback on some of my stories, it’s been clear that on some occasions the reader hasn’t trusted me. Therefore, when I’ve done things a little unorthodox, left-field, or intentionally paired words that wouldn’t normally go together (no, I don’t mean I’m incoherent), they’ve sometimes been picked up on, and questioned. Part of this — good and bad — you can put down to the reader’s preferences and expectations, and also their knowledge of you.
Trust in an author is something that a reader who doesn’t know you can’t have. Say you have a raft of books published by Tor, the issue then becomes moot, I suppose, but none of us here have that, so I’ll discount it. When someone reads the opening to your book not only do you have to hook them with that aforementioned promise, you have to make them feel safe in your hands. Reading a book is for some an onerous undertaking - Kindle estimates can be between 4-9 hours depending on the book size - and no one is going to give you that much of their life if they don’t trust you.
But the thing is, trust is a nebulous thing when it comes to getting it. I’ve lately been picking up books by self-pubbed authors, or indie/small presses, and I have to say, the democratisation of publishing has made it far harder to invest trust in a lot of them. As I’m a completist, once I start a book, I have to finish it, and sometimes — sometimes — the author who I’ve not trusted does a great job, and by the end of the novel I see the need to have read it in its entirety before deciding whether it would be any good or not. But we don’t have that luxury; not everyone who picks up our story is a completist, and if they don’t like it, they won’t finish it.
However, with some of these new authors (and ones who are established but I’ve not heard of), I’ve felt ‘safe’ in their hands within the opening paragraph. It’s something that just comes, that I can’t pinpoint, or define.
For me I can identify things that give me trust in the opening lines or paragraph etc, but I wonder what you’d add to this list?
1) A smart opening line:
Is “Call me Ishmael” really a stonkingly good opening line? No. Neither is “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” Not in themselves anyway. A smart line is more like George Orwell’s one about 13 o’clock, or Douglas Adams’ one about the creation of the universe. What is it that has Moby Dick's or The Gunslinger's line lauded, then? If I pick up a book with an intriguing or smart first line, I’m pretty much sold.
If someone posted in Crits here, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” how many people would have replied, ‘You’re telling, not showing.’ Not to compare ourselves with Dickens, but what makes the line permissible? And here I’m a hypocrite because Daphne Du Maurier’s “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” just holds so much, it's so evocative, when really it isn’t; and dreams are such a hum-drum trope, I wonder why it strikes a chord with me and gives me so much trust.
2) A lyrical or arresting image:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” is a short, concise one from Zora Neale Hurston that you can’t help but love and infer an entire story from. I suppose the Pride and Prejudice opening is well-crafted and might fall into this category, although I suspect it’s more category No. 1.
Without a doubt, my favourite every opening to any book ever, ever, ever is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s smart and gives you total trust in her skills:
And on that, it’s strange to me because I find these kind of openings far more commonly in horror and weird fiction than in anything else I read. Of course horrors roots lie in literary fiction so it makes a certain degree of sense, but…
What are your thoughts?
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