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Clarity on opening a book with "action"

MineOwnKing

Maester
Opening to Titus Groan. Brilliant. Particularly love the last two lines. Not even a character introduced unless you consider the castle a character in its own right, which some have argued:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Once upon a time this kind of opening might have been okay.

Modern writing has evolved and is also a slave to corporate decisions that manage publishing houses.

Now, if you want to win the love of an agent, publisher, consumer, even if you wrote the greatest literary fantasy ever this way, chances are it's going to the trash.
 

kennyc

Inkling
Once upon a time this kind of opening might have been okay.

Modern writing has evolved and is also a slave to corporate decisions that manage publishing houses.

Now, if you want to win the love of an agent, publisher, consumer, even if you wrote the greatest literary fantasy ever this way, chances are it's going to the trash.

I disagree completely.
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
While I understand the argument regarding modern trends in literature & corporate influences, I don't agree completely. For most writers, this is probably true. However, a writer with enough skill (like Peake in 1940-1950s) would still find a place and a following in today's market.

I hear a lot about the "modern reader". As I became more & more serious about writing, I initially bought into the idea that modern readers don't like the older styles, but I grew to question that thinking. After all, I'm a modern reader and I love that opening, which goes against the standard, modern advice of not opening with description. Considering the book is still widely read, how can it be that "modern readers" don't like this style?

Your opening, just as the rest of your story, simply needs to be interesting. There are a multitude of ways the achieve that effect. None of them should be off the table.
 
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Mythopoet

Auror
Once upon a time this kind of opening might have been okay.

Modern writing has evolved and is also a slave to corporate decisions that manage publishing houses.

Now, if you want to win the love of an agent, publisher, consumer, even if you wrote the greatest literary fantasy ever this way, chances are it's going to the trash.

You are correct about the agents and publishers. But not about consumers. Yes, there are consumers who will only settle for modern cinematic style writing. But they are by no means all. Readers will buy anything that is interesting to them. And there are infinite ways to interest readers. The truth is that you can't turn book appeal into a formula. If you could then all published books would be hits, but they're not. Not by a long shot. Agents and publishers don't know what will sell anymore than the random man on the street does.

Personally (and by no means am I presenting myself as a representative of readers as a whole, rather an example of how varied readers are), I cannot stand the modern cinematic "start it with action!" approach. Nothing interests me so little as throwing me into the middle of some type of action when I don't yet know the characters or the setting and have no context for the thing. I just end up not caring and tossing another book aside. These days I can tell by the opening sentence if the writing is going to be boringly cinematic. Most recently written books apply. I've learned to seek refuge in classics instead.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
The opening needs to be interesting. Doesn't matter how you accomplish it - action, mystery, plot hook, the prose itself, &c.

This...

I'll also add that you should spend some time thinking about your story's true beginning. Typically, the advice I cling to is to start your story as late into the tale as you can. Following that advice usually brings action and/or the interesting/engaging parts to the fore.

This is generally how I feel.


Once upon a time this kind of opening might have been okay.

Modern writing has evolved and is also a slave to corporate decisions that manage publishing houses.

Now, if you want to win the love of an agent, publisher, consumer, even if you wrote the greatest literary fantasy ever this way, chances are it's going to the trash.

I don't know, I think if something is good enough, it's good enough. It just has to be interesting enough to make the reader keep reading. I mean just take a look at the opening two paragraphs of Harry Potter. Not exactly action packed, but there's enough to make one keep going.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.
 
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MineOwnKing

Maester
Nostalgia for classic fiction is addictive and rewarding, The Heart of Darkness has one of the greatest openings of any novel. It was written in a time when the fan base would have been wealthy English gentry.

Ask a typical person on the street that was forced to read Heart of Darkness for high school English and they will probably relay how much they hated it.

That is one reason why writing must evolve.

Modern day genre fiction has been altered to cater to its largest fan base, females.

95% of literary agents are women.

I don't want to cast any stones here so I'll let people use their imaginations as to how these facts have changed the industry standards.

Probably not very many guys are buying 'Bear needs a Bride."
 

Mythopoet

Auror
Nostalgia for classic fiction is addictive and rewarding, The Heart of Darkness has one of the greatest openings of any novel. It was written in a time when the fan base would have been wealthy English gentry.

Ask a typical person on the street that was forced to read Heart of Darkness for high school English and they will probably relay how much they hated it.

That is one reason why writing must evolve.

Modern day genre fiction has been altered to cater to its largest fan base, females.

95% of literary agents are women.

I don't want to cast any stones here so I'll let people use their imaginations as to how these facts have changed the industry standards.

Probably not very many guys are buying 'Bear needs a Bride."

The only people Heart of Darkness is a classic to are literature majors/professors (same thing). Gormenghast, on the other hand, is a classic because readers keep recommending it to each other and passing it on from generation to generation. As much as I personally dislike the book, I must give it credit where credit is due. It fascinates readers. Though the opening is one of the worst I've ever read, personally. Obviously that isn't true for many people. Once again, readers are a highly varied group of individuals.

I think what you need to do is evolve your understanding of the world of storytelling and book publishing past the outmoded ideas of the "industry". They're losing market share every day to the people who really know how to connect with readers: the indie authors.
 

MineOwnKing

Maester
I don't need to do anything.

Miskatonic asked a question and I tried to help.

I am an indie author. I could care less about what agents want.
 

MineOwnKing

Maester
Don't shoot the messenger.

What I want has nothing to do with the facts of successful marketing.

What was successful in the past no longer applies.
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
What was successful in the past no longer applies.
A quick perusal of my digital library shows your assumption to be shaky at best. Consider the following fantasy openings, none of which start with action:
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, 2004

It was an odd-looking vine. Dusky variegated leaves hunkered against a stem that wound in a stranglehold around the smooth trunk of a balsam fir. Sap drooled down the wounded bark, and dry limbs slumped, making it look as if the tree were trying to voice a moan into the cool, damp morning air. Pods stuck out from the vine here and there along its length, almost seeming to look warily about for witnesses.

Terry Goodkind - Wizard's First Rule, 1994

A History of the Six Duchies is of necessity a history of its ruling family, the Farseers. A complete telling would reach back beyond the founding of the First Duchy and, if such names were remembered, would tell us of Outislanders raiding from the sea, visiting as pirates a shore more temperate and gentler than the icy beaches of the Out Islands. But we do not know the names of these earliest forebears.

Robin Hobb - Assassin's Apprentice, 1995

IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn's sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music...but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind, 2007
 
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T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
I wrote nothing about starting with action.

I said it should be interesting and contain a hook.

Apologies then. It seemed your position was against descriptive beginnings like Peake's opening of Gormenghast...that it was outdated and therefore would not be successful with modern publishers. Perhaps I was wrong.

Still, there is not a "hook" in any of those openings, at least not in the sense that most contemporary advice touts as necessary.
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
I would argue, though, that all those intros do have a hook… based on what I've been reading about hooks actually being 'questions'.

With Strange and Norrell she sets it up so that the magicians are not doing what one would typically think they should be doing, so they read on to find out why.

With Terry Goodkind's line, we wonder "why was it odd looking? What was so weird about it?" and keep reading to find out. (P.S. side note, can I say how happy I am to see someone quote this book? It was my first fantasy I ever bought myself in eighth grade, before I knew anything about Ayn Rand or any political agenda. I just loved the book for the book. The rest of the series, meh, but I still have a soft spot for this book).
 

MineOwnKing

Maester
My position is irrelevant.

I like Joseph Conrad along with many classic author's.

There are always going to be examples that defy the status quo.

Anybody that has spent time querying agents like I have, knows what I say is fact and not theory.

Write a book that gets you in the door, or write a crowd pleaser that wins an award, then write the books you want to read.

'It is useless to push a cart sideways.'
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
I would argue, though, that all those intros do have a hook... based on what I've been reading about hooks actually being 'questions'.
A Hook is any technique that grabs the reader's attention and keeps them reading. It may be exactly that, a question raised, but it can be anything that piques interest. In that regard, I agree with you. However, the examples don't hook with action or even a character as is commonly advised, which goes back to the original point. Your beginning simply needs to pique interest. There are a plethora of ways to achieve this effect.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
There are people writing successful novels that start, and continue, with heavy description and dense use of words. That's just an empirical fact. You can go to the book store and see the books. You just have to be a damned good writer to pull it off. Conrad and others aren't still being read just because they are old. There were plenty of other writers who wrote popular fiction back in those days who have vanished into obscurity. Writers like Conrad and others are still read because they were brilliant authors. I'm reading Emma, by Jane Austen, which will be 200 years old next year. Great book.

The fact is, most modern commercial authors couldn't write like that if they had to do so to save their lives, and most of the works they are putting out won't be known, much less read, in a hundred years. The writers can put out stuff that sells but they're not capable of writing that lasts. The few authors who can put out works that will come to be classics decades hence can still get published. If someone like Peake or even Conrad were to pop up now, in 2015, I have little doubt they'd be able to find both an agent and a publisher.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
I guess as with all "writing rules" the thing to take away from it is to stick with if you're uncertain, but that there are countless of great examples of the "rule" not being followed.
 

Russ

Istar
I guess as with all "writing rules" the thing to take away from it is to stick with if you're uncertain, but that there are countless of great examples of the "rule" not being followed.

I would offer a variation on this.

Writing rules don't exist to force you to change a part of your work that has a purpose and you feel strongly positive about.

Writing rules exist to give you guidance when you are unsure of something or to help diagnose and fix problems you are having trouble getting a handle on.
 
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