I’d wager to say that developing a high concept premise is something all writers struggle with from time to time. Let’s face it—it’s not easy to boil down a four hundred page novel to twenty-five words or less. As difficult as it is, however, there’s nothing more valuable than having those precious few words readily available when someone asks, “What’s your book about?”
If done well, your premise can very well prompt an agent or editor to ask for your complete manuscript or send a reader in search of your book. But when it comes down to the actual book and getting readers invested in the story, the game of enticement has only begun.
The book market is extremely competitive, and a writer needs every advantage he or she can get. Great covers, luring blurbs, catchy titles help, but sometimes we have little to no control over them. What we do control, however, not only captures readers, it keeps them coming back for more. And that is the first sentence, first paragraph, first page of our story.
Living in a society that has the attention span of a gnat, writers are offered a minimal grace period (say three to five pages) before a reader will toss a book aside, declaring it boring.
With that in mind, I thought I’d try a little experiment. I chose a few books from my bookshelves to see how headline authors handled their openings. I limited the openings to the first paragraph of each book. In some cases , the first paragraph was only a sentence long….
1. Act One, Scene One, the Storyteller thought to himself and couldn’t hold back a dizzying rush of anticipation. The truth was that ordinary people committed perfect crimes and perfect murders all the time. But you didn’t hear about it for the simple reason that the killers never got caught.
2. The girl lay in bed determined not to go to sleep.
3. On the day I got the job, we celebrated.
4. Summer’s here.
5. Deucalion seldom slept, but when he did, he dreamed. Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares, after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.
Given only these intros, which book would you choose to read further?
8 Comments, Comment or Ping
David Niall Wilson
Hmmm… I’m not enamored of any of them, but if it was a question wherin I had to read one of thse, and not the others, I’d read the first one…interesting experiment…I may check some of the books on my shelf to see how they stack up…
DNW
Feb 18th, 2006
Teresa
#2 no doubt. I love sleeping and can’t imagine being determined not to go to sleep. ‘Girl’ suggests a child or teen as oppossed to an adult and I’ve always had a soft spot for stories involving kids. It didn’t say in ‘the bed’ so I picture her in her own bed. Maybe she’s afraid of her dreams or maybe she’s excited, waiting for someone to come in to see her. Maybe she doesn’t want the morning to arrive and she know it comes ‘quicker’ if she sleeps…so many possibilities. I’ve just got to read on…
Feb 18th, 2006
Deborah LeBlanc
In case anybody’s wondering,
1. Mary, Mary –James Patterson
2. Midnight Voices - John Saul
3. The Ignored–Bentley Little
4. The Regulators - Stephen King
5. Frankenstein - Book One, Prodigal Son
Feb 18th, 2006
David Niall Wilson
Hah! Never would have guessed those… and that’s one by Patterson I haven’t read….
DNW
Feb 18th, 2006
James A. Moore
Nicely done, Deborah! Also a much needed reminder to writers. My normal suggestion is to find a way to describe your novel in one sentence. Obviously, you’ll never get everything, but if you’re good enough you can catch someone’s attention.
Two examples:
UNDER THE OVERTREE: It’s about puberty and monsters and whether or not there’s really a difference.
FIREWORKS: What if the alleged Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash of 1947 happened today and IN a small town instead of near it?
Feb 19th, 2006
Craig Wolf
Number 2. Both 1 and 5 strike me as wordy and a touch pretentious, and while I may well press on with the novels, they don’t grab me. Number 3 . . . eh. We know why you celebrated, you got the job, so there’s no immediate tension. 4 is okay, no problem. But with number 2, we have immediate conflict (a girl is in bed, where one sleeps, but she’s fighting it, and fighting it hard, as the choice of the word ‘determined’ tells us) and we have in a single sentence. It’s not the best hook ever, but I think it’s the best of the 5 here.
As they say, your mileage may vary.
Feb 19th, 2006
Jen
Context does play a bit of a role in this, however. As a reader and writer of horror, when I saw number three, I got that same feel of immediate tension. Picking up a horror novel that starts with a celebration like that, I’m instantly leaning forward in a moment of “uhoh, then what happened?”
But in general, I agree. Call me a gnat if you must, but those one-line openers packed more punch, where the wordier items left me rather cold.
Feb 21st, 2006
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