“Remember, writing is almost as much fun as sex!“
Ray Bradbury’s book inscription to Alec McCabe in 1989
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“An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this,” Stephen King says. But…
“How can a writer extend an appealing invitation — one that’s difficult, even, to refuse?” King asks, and answers by discussing the opening sentence from James M. Cain’s ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’, “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”
“Suddenly, you’re right inside the story….But Cain pulls off so much more… This sentence tells you more than you think it tells you. Nobody’s riding on the hay truck because they bought a ticket. He’s a basically a drifter, someone on the outskirts, someone who’s going to steal and filch to get by. So you know a lot about him from the beginning, more than maybe registers in your conscious mind, and you start to get curious.”
What’s your favorite opening line?
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21 Books That Will Teach You Something Important — like how to read, how to write, how to understand string theory…
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Top 10 dynamic duos in fiction — Frodo and Sam, Calvin and Hobbes ….
Who would you most like to meet?
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A recent study indicates that the ages at which we’re most satisfied are in fact 23 and 69, giving us not one but two stages of life to relish.
Enjoying life.
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