Novel First Lines
Posted by Matt Uhrich
Inexplicable Book Cover
The first line of a novel is the most important line in the most important paragraph on the most important page. Sol Stein writes:
Some years ago I was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in mid- Manhattan bookstores. In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample.
That was written almost 15 years ago. I’m sure people have gotten even more impatient when decide whether they should buy a novel. It’s quite a bit of pressure. It’s also why writers look at the first lines of their favorite novels to provide inspiration.
One of my all-time favorite books is Treason by Orson Scott Card. It’s actually a revised version of a previously published novel named A Planet Called Treason (which I've never actually read). It being one of my favorites is the only reason I have chosen it for an example of a good first line. Here it is, It gets the job done well.
I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew.
Reading it, I want to know what the speaker now knows and what he now knows he now knows. And look at that cover! It has a guy in a space suit walking to a space ship and he's walking with a cane. Cool! Except nowhere in the novel are there any space suits or space ships–there may be a cane but I don't remember. Did the artist even read the book’s blurb? I hope to one day have to ask my publisher why there is a dragon fighting a spaceship in front of a destroyed city on the cover of my novel which contains none of those things.
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For a good laugh and many fine examples of horrible science-fiction and fantasy covers, check out Good Show Sir.
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This is my new favorite commercial.
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Reflections on 10,000 Words
Posted by Matt Uhrich
I sit here having just passed the 10,000 word mark and I’m feeling pretty good. When I first began this enterprise, I wasn’t sure how difficult I would find it to write the number of words necessary to fill an entire novel. I worried that I would finish the story and discover I didn’t have much more than a short story.
In college, one of my biggest challenges was being able to write enough to satisfy the page requirements of papers I had been assigned. I had to use all the formatting tricks available to fill the five or ten or twenty pages demanded by the professor. I’d increase the margins, increase the spacing between the letters, use slightly more than double spacing, and of course use the Courier New font. How I loved that font.
Photo by robotographyWhen I read what other authors have to say about their writing process, most of them write much more than they are planning to keep in the final version. Then they slice and dice to get to their desired word count. I hope I don’t have the opposite problem.
10,000 words has gotten me through four chapters and I’ve I still got a bit to go before my first major plot point. I’d like to have another 10,000 words or more before I get there. There’s a chance I’ll struggle doing that. I might have to go back and add more detail to a few of the scenes. I tried to avoid having too much detail—maybe too well. Books describing every tree in the forest in exacting detail annoy me and I often end up putting them down—usually for good.
One of the most encouraging aspects of the writing I’ve done is how the words have come more easily the more I’ve written. I had read that writing improves with practice and I believe I’m finding that to be true. Here’s to hoping the improvement continues.
Aloha.
Writing Blogs… er, Blogs about Writing
Posted by Matt Uhrich
When I first made the decision to commit to writing a novel, I looked for web sites or blogs created by other authors. I found several good ones. Those blogs led me to other blogs created by agents, editors, and even sales people from publishing houses. What surprised me was how helpful and genuinely nice these people were. I don’t know why that should surprise me. I suppose when I hear the title "agent," I think of people like Scott Boras, Drew Rosenhaus, and Ari Gold from Entourage. Reading these blogs made my desire to write a novel grow—I want to work with these people!
Every day in Google Reader and Twitter I find dozens of articles or blog posts with priceless information for an aspiring writer. I find myself wondering, what did people do before the Internet? I guess they must have bought books and taken classes. But how did they know which books or classes were the good ones? They didn’t have the Internet to find reviews and ratings.
In the first few first posts I read was a list of books every writer should own. At the top of the list was Stein on Writing by Sol Stein. What an incredible book! If you are a writer and have not read this book you are guilty of malpractice. Stein divulges the secrets and techniques he has developed over decades of writing and editing best sellers.
Photo by SapphireblueOne of the things every writer has been told is, “Show don’t tell.” Most of the time the person telling you that stops there. Great! Thanks for the help! In one of my favorite chapters in the book, Stein explains what this statement means and gives some outstanding examples. My favorite is a quote from a John Updike story. A hack writer like me would write, “Polly loved to dive in her swimming pool.” But a brilliant writer like Updike writes:
With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurtled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair.
Amazing.
Throughout the book Stein states his preference for literary fiction as opposed to what he calls “transient fiction.” Read this book and he will come close to convincing you that literary fiction is the only form of fiction worthy of your efforts. Sadly, I just read a post at Pimp My Novel stating that things are not looking good for literary fiction. The public’s preferences being what they are, big publishing houses aren’t buying much literary fiction. And for the books they are publishing sales are usually dominated by a few titles in the genre. One of the dominating literary fiction books mentioned is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I read it a few years ago and I would recommend it highly.
Stein has written many other books, both fiction and non-fiction. I’ve got How to Grow a Novel sitting on the table next to me ready to be read in the next few days. I’ve also purchased one of his novels, The Best Revenge. Reading excerpts from it throughout Stein on Writing whetted my appetite for it. I’m betting his fiction is as excellent as his non-fiction.
Ciao.
New Blog/New Writing Endeavor
Posted by Matt Uhrich
Photo by L. MarieI’ve been an avid reader since I was a kid. It started when I was nine or ten and my parents made the rule that I could stay up later if I was reading a book. Thanks for the addiction, mom and dad.
Sometime early in high school my dad gave me Citizen of the Galaxy and Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein. I was hooked on science-fiction immediately. I’ll read almost any genre if I’m in the right mood, but for the last twenty years, my one true love has been science-fiction.
I’ve had the urge to write for most of that time, but other interests and a decided lack of ability in that area pushed it out of my mind. In the 10 years since college, the urge has returned. And over the last five years has intensified. Added to that is a growing distaste for office life and working for a company. So I’ve decided to do something about it and begin writing a novel—science-fiction, of course.
I’ve been taking notes on four or five story ideas for the past few years. I never got to the point where I would actually write anything other than notes. They are all good ideas for stories, but one in particular generated far more notes than the others. I would find myself thinking about it several times a day.
Certain events over the past few years have led me to the conclusion that I needed to begin the process of extracting myself from the mainstream IT and business world. I came to a point in my life where I needed to fully commit to application development in order to stay current with the constantly changing technology scene or branch off into something else. I had already decided that management was not the path for me.
All these things led to the decision that it was time for me to take action and work towards a career in writing science-fiction. So this spring I became one of the many unpublished authors. At this time I have finished three chapters and by word-count about 10% of the novel.
I’ll be posting anything interesting I encounter while I work on the novel. I’ll also post articles or excerpts from books I read that I think will be useful to other writers. There’s a good chance I’ll post idiotic or funny stuff I find as well. My hope is to build a decent following so that if a miracle occurs and I get published, I’ll have a few dozen fans willing to buy it right away. Sounds likely, right?
I’d to post semi-regularly, whatever that means, and I will do my best to make the posts interesting and keep them under 500 words. No promises though.
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If you’re here for one of the programming articles I wrote for the old blog, I’m sorry to say, they are gone. There was only one that people seemed interested in. So if you really need to know how to search for a value in all of the tables of a SQL Server database, send me an email and I’ll get you the information.