I could also have the main character narrate scenes that don't feature him, but I'm still unsure.

Anyway, I have the first 13 for the variuos openers I've tried, as well as the manuscript that has most of the full openings if anyone's interested. I'm interested in any comments or critiques, as well as if the hook grabbed you or not (etc.) If you'd like to read more I can e-mail them to you, just ask, thanks!

Ver 1
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Rex was 16 and already a murderer; barely a man but certainly capable of killing one. As he lay in his coffin, silent and motionless his mother wept for him uncontrollably at his side. Rex wasn't dead of course, not yet at least (this being fortune or not, as you will soon see.) His coffin was special, one connected to a million tiny gears and a giant steam-engine that beat its brass heart creating staccato reverberations throughout the entire congregation, taking up a third of the chapel's space. Rex was separated from the outside world by a glass case top and brass undercarriage, and supported by cushioned felt scraps and sawdust. He couldn't move as he had been chained down to the inside, and he couldn't talk as the abbot forbade him not to during the ceremony. "The dead do not

Ver 2
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Rex was 16, and already a murderer, barely a man but certainly capable of killing one. He was the notorious blood butcher from Calicut. Caught between childhood and adolescence somehow his mind became twisted in such a way as to have the childlike distant and pitiless approach to macabre with the brutality and reasoning mind of an adult. A being, who on the cusp of adulthood had damned his soul to the fires of Sheol if he had one at all. This breathtaking sensationalism is what painted every newspaper in the past few months. He was on everyone's tongue, haunting the fringes of everyone's dreams, and now? He was in Nicolo's room, no more than two feet from him. He chewed at his fingernails as his entourage, two sturdy built sailors picked at Nicolo's belongings for the money.

Ver 3
================
By 16 Rex was already a serial killer, not yet a man but more than capable of killing one. When Rex finally came to this notion it was at a critical moment in his life. Essentially he was chained to the inside of an inter-planetary coffin connected to a giant launch device in the cathedral's central aisle, sprung up from the floor through a million twittering gears and devices. It was customary for the church appointed abbot of Calicut India to perform such services as launching the condemned into the exile planet Nod, miraculously discovered some 70 years ago. This whirring ball of mysterious severance was said to be the homeland of damned men such as Caine and Longinus, and since the church discovered it first (and as there was no way to survive a return trip) the church

Ver 4
====================
At 16 I was already a murderer, they called me the Butcher of Calicut, in India, my birthplace. It started on a damp ugly day in September. I was staring out of my window into the forest and enjoying the last precious centimeters of a cigarette when Sirius (my father) approached my door. He didn't knock, but I could sense the terse change in the atmosphere of the room was attributed to his sudden presence. I had kept my door locked for several days and kept the key to my room on the dresser, but that wouldn't stop him. I turned around to watch the key wiggle slightly before it jumped off the dresser and into the aether. Seconds later I heard the rusty cry of the lock churning in the door and Sirius stepped into the room, his immense frame blocking out the light from the hallway.

If you've read all that thank you for taking the time! ^_^

quote:

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I'm writing a novel called Haasten: The Magnificent Flying Kasteel. I imagine it might be 600 pages when finished, I don't know for sure right now. I'm having a hard time coming up with the opening chapter right now because I don't know what kind of voice to use. I'm really good at first person, but there are scenes later on I feel I want to tell in 3rd person (outside of the main character.) I'm afraid if I stick mostly to the main character and only occasionally switch to outside characters the story might read off-balance or something.

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If that's what you intend, go with 3rd person. You're indeed right - switching characters between 1st and 3rd would throw people off and in a way defeat the purpose of 1st person narrative (or otherwise won't make sense). I wouldn't worry about being "better" at one than the other.

quote:

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I could also have the main character narrate scenes that don't feature him, but I'm still unsure.

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My gut reaction would be to think that that would be kinda corny. Like OSC explained in "How to Write Sci-Fi," when you're using 1st person, you're stuck to what the character knows at that moment. If he's going to be narrating one part, he should be narrating the entire thing, and in past-tense (like he was giving a report or retelling his memoir). It would be awkward to say the least to have him narrate something that's taking place in real-time, far removed from him.

quote:

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Ver 1
===============
Rex was 16 and already a murderer; barely a man but certainly capable of killing one. As he lay in his coffin, silent and motionless his mother wept for him uncontrollably at his side. Rex wasn't dead of course, not yet at least (this being fortune or not, as you will soon see.) <--this throws me off a bit - it's a sudden, jarring and kinda tacky PoV switchHis coffin was special, one connected to a million tiny gears and a giant steam-engine that beat its brass heart creating staccato reverberations throughout the entire congregation, taking up a third of the chapel's space. Rex was separated from the outside world by a glass case top and brass undercarriage, and supported by cushioned felt scraps and sawdust. He couldn't move as he had been chained down to the inside, and he couldn't talk as the abbot forbade him not to during the ceremony. "The dead do not talk. So I'd best see less of you speak an utterance else the church will off you through steel to the throat demon."

Ver 2
===============
Rex was 16, and already a murderer, barely a man but certainly capable of killing one. He was the notorious blood butcher from Calicut. Caught between childhood and adolescence somehow his mind became twisted in such a way as to have the childlike distant and pitiless approach to macabre with the brutality and reasoning mind of an adult. A being, who on the cusp of adulthood had damned his soul to the fires of Sheol if he had one at all. This breathtaking sensationalism is what painted every newspaper in the past few months. He was on everyone's tongue, haunting the fringes of everyone's dreams, and now? He was in Nicolo's room, no more than two feet from him. He chewed at his fingernails as his entourage, two sturdy built sailors picked at Nicolo's belongings for the money.This one's a much better hook than the other - it establishes the character neatly, is not buried in technical detail and it immediately sets up a scene of potential action

Ver 3
================
By 16 Rex was already a serial killer, not yet a man but more than capable of killing one. When Rex finally came to this notion it was at a critical moment in his life. Essentially he was chained to the inside of an inter-planetary coffin connected to a giant launch device in the cathedral's central aisle, sprung up from the floor through a million twittering gears and devices. It was customary for the church appointed abbot of Calicut India to perform such services as launching the condemned into the exile planet Nod, miraculously discovered some 70 years ago. This whirring ball of mysterious severance was said to be the homeland of damned men such as Caine and Longinus, and since the church discovered it first (and as there was no way to survive a return trip) the church council found it best to exile those humans deemed too fargone the coil of humanity into the inky black and the waiting arms of the torture they so deserved.This is definitely a change from the last one and more like the first - it seems to be setting up almost an entirely different plot from the second one. Like the second one, it sets up the character but I'm just having trouble finding why I should care about this character

Ver 4
====================
At 16 I was already a murderer, they called me the Butcher of Calicut, in India, my birthplace. It started on a damp ugly day in September. I was staring out of my window into the forest and enjoying the last precious centimeters of a cigarette when Sirius (my father) approached my door. He didn't knock, but I could sense the terse change in the atmosphere of the room was attributed to his sudden presence. I had kept my door locked for several days and kept the key to my room on the dresser, but that wouldn't stop him. I turned around to watch the key wiggle slightly before it jumped off the dresser and into the aether. Seconds later I heard the rusty cry of the lock churning in the door and Sirius stepped into the room, his immense frame blocking out the light from the hallway.this seems to largely be the second one, just with 1st person PoV. That said, it doesn't engage me as much as the second one - it's too much what the character is doing now, and not enough of who the character is so that we can care about him

If you've read all that thank you for taking the time! ^_^

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Just to confuse you, I'm gonna say I found the first version most compelling. . Seriously, though, I liked it because you dive right into describing his coffin etc, all of which is fascinating to me and sets the stage for the world. I'd have to know pretty quickly why he's still kept alive even though he's "dead", and why the abbot seems to be colluding with him, and for what purpose.

Version 2 feels a little too distant and expository. It starts off in some sort of timelessness, and it's not till toward the end of the 13 lines that he's actually grounded in space and time. Plus it throws in some names which just made my eyes glaze over-- Calicut, Sheol, Niccolo.

Similarly, version 3 quickly got overcomplicated for me. I want to know more about Rex before I get into Nod and Longinus and all this history.

Version 4 just felt kind of flat. While I don't have an inherent problem with the first person, but the interaction with the father didn't quite entice me as the scene in the church, which seemed to have much more complexity and felt more original.

I, too, am a big anime steampunk fan. I'd love to read it, but I don't know if I have the time right now to read the whole manuscript. I could just read the opening if you like.

You don't have to worry about reading a whole manuscript. The 13 lines I've written here take up the bulk of what I've written (there's probably five or so other paragraphs from the manuscript total aside from the openers here.) If you're still interested I can send a manuscript.

To G-Bus,

The last line needs a major change to make it at all clear, though. I get the basic sense of it after much parsing, but it would be funnier if I got it in the first pass.

Sounds like fun!

For figuring out voice; you can shape third person to be almost as personally narrated as first person. The way the narrator is perceiving things should color the whole manuscript even if they aren't immediately telling the story. I've read books with mixes of first and third, or even first, second, epistolatory...but that's not worth doing if not well and to an effect that's part of the book as a whole. (Or, just that you really want to: then it becomes a part of the whole, too.) I think you should run with third, try not to get bogged down so early with voice matters. If you write third with plenty of character you CAN change to first if that's what you have to do. (Though hopefully by the third chapter or so you'll know, so you don't have to change too much.)

I liked the first opening, because the 'Steampunk' genre attracts me and the first is the only opening that gets to the steam, and appears to set the MC a problem - where's the coffin going and what's he going to do about it.

The opening you now have essentially introduces us to a really, really bad guy, for me, no hook. And I read somewhere that if you want the audience to believe someone's really, really bad, either show us a scene where he does something bad, or show us through the reactions of characters we know to the bad guy.

But, as WouldBe said, maybe it's a good idea to get the thing written, then fine tune the opening because you'll have a clearer idea of the things we need to know at the start, and the information that can be fed in later.

For example, I imagine the coffin's going somewhere: you could perhaps show us how bad he is by having him do something really terrible on arrival, and his new friends saying something like, 'Oh no, it's the Butcher from Calicut!' - but less corny, of course. That would mean you could use the first 13 to tell us something else - like about the steam and gears and glass and brass of the coffin, pretty please!

And one more thing: I think that, like me, you have a tendency to write long sentences which, if not reigned in, tends to lose the reader in an excess of parsing effort, diluting comprehension and becoming a little tiring to read ;-)

Just my 2c,
Pat

As much as I'd like to use the first 13 to explain the intracacies of the coffin device, that's all explained in the fourth paragraph in very vivid detail. Plus there's a lot more space to go into the spigots and brass knobs and the deep meticulous churning of the steam engine. And as much as I'd like to go into it right off, my main concern is the characters and events. Steampunk fans will hopefully read the book and pass it along, so they'll have prior knowledge that the book contains lots of wonderous devices and clicking techno-wonders. However, everyone else would (hopefully) be drawn to the characters and the drama that surrounds them. But, you've given me a great idea! I'm used to scribing about the inner-thoughts of my characters through fps short stories, but I'm beginning to mull around the idea of using the steam-machines in the background to allude to the inner-thoughts and troubles of my characters.

That said the first chapter is primarily from the townspeople's pov, so my aim was to setup this horrible perception of the mc before we get into his head one page later and learn more about who he really is. That said I should probably make it a bit clearer that Rex might not be this horrible person, and that all of these things said about him are only rumors... With a bit of truth.

I've written over 5,000 words so far, and I've got the voice I want to use and the style. I'm beginning to think a lot of people like the second version because it has extremely creative sentences, but I'm afraid I'd wind sounding unclear because of my reliance on english lexicon, circus-style pole vaulting, and adjective pandemonium. There is a lyrical taste to it that just tickles the nose of mental showmanship, but at the end of the day what about clarity? Understanding, and other noble pursuits? (Or something to that moniker :P)

Blarg, third time writing this post and I can't make it any less condensed... Anyway,

1.) Must change wording in first 13 to sew the seed of doubt on Rex' guilt.
2.) Use steampunk genre archetypes to help boost the character drama.
3.) The coffin is an important hook, and people seem to enjoy it. Which is going to be brutal because so far the scene ends with a church hand about to start up the machine, and follows up with 2-3 chapters of how Rex got there.
4.) There are awkward sentences I gotta fix as I re-read it.

"The coffin is an important hook..." For me it was more than the coffin. The bizarre combination of coffin, steam engine, being chained down, being not dead, the abbot (Abbot?) telling him to be quiet - instead of being, well, abbotic - whetted my appetite for an original-sounding world.

But it's your story. Do start it as you choose, of course. If you'd like to send it my way, I'd like to read it.