Okay, it's not fully published... only the first 5 chapters are up on-line. But if anyone wants to discuss the the first few paragraphs, that would be cool.
posted
I really should not have read this, considering it will be another three months before I can finish it (it takes the library about a month to order a new book, and I'm too poor to buy it). That said, I'm thoroughly hooked. The characters have taken up residence in my mind, and won't leave me alone. The whole Shadow series was not really my cup of tea, so I'm looking forward to reading something completely new.
posted
Hmmmm... It didn't have the kind of hook I'm getting used to aplauding here; I wasn't really hooked at all until well into the chapter. The first paragraph just described a typical homeless man, and two of the four sentences were passive. The first glimpse of a hook came from the driver's shudder -- and that wasn't even a response to the homeless man; it was a response to someone who (in the first chapter at least) was a bit player. I guess you can use this kind of opening in a longer work, though, especially if you are an established writer; since I have read much of Card's work, there was little risk that I would put it down because the first 13 lines didn't grab me.
Posts: 491 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
Heh, I was hooked by reading the blurb at the beginning. But knowing that this story was written by Card definitely helps. I've read enough of his work to trust that he will deliver a good story. And I like his stand-alone novels.
I just went back and looked at just the first 13 lines. You're right, they're not particularly hookish. But they aren't bad, either. And by the end of the fifth chapter, I was desperately wanting more.
I think most readers are more generous than editors, though. Personally, I give a book several chapters usually. I know I got at least two chapters into Neuromancer the first time I tried to read it. I kept hoping it would get better. So once you get established, you don't have to worry about hooking the editors as much. As long as your books sell, you're good.
posted
And until your name and writerly reputation are good enough that readers will trust you, you have to keep working on those 13 lines (as well as the rest of the story) so that they will keep reading long enough to learn to trust you.
And then you have to continue to fulfill that trust, even though you don't have to work as hard on the 13 lines per se. You still have to make sure the whole story is worth reading.
posted
Looks like this one will plumb the depths of OSC fertile imagination. Not much going for it in the first paragraph as far as a hook for me.
One thing I found odd is that he never describes this baby's eyes. Infants' eyes draw me like a magnet. I guess he wanted the reader to focus on the people who would raise the child, and so didn't really let us know too much about the baby. But as a reader, I really did want to know more, especially given his bizarre beginning.
posted
I'm going to say that it would be enough to get me to turn the page. If someone had posted an opening of similar quality here, I would have understood the grammatical reasons for introducing the old homeless guy first, since he has to be an object in the first POV line, and that wouldn't be possible without resorting to utter Faulkneristic prose if you began with "Dr. Byron Williams passed...", which would be an additional problem because by the time we learned in what sense Byron had passed the man, we could already have reached some incorrect conclusions as well as getting totally lost in the syntax.
Anyone that didn't have a problem following that last sentence should feel free to wish Card had done it that way.
But there is more to it than that. Card is deliberately using a very slow introduction to the POV character here, subtly betraying expectations to make his somewhat atypical character seem natural. Of course, you don't find that out till the next page, but I think that most editors would reach that page, and most readers as well, whether or not they'd ever heard of Card (many people haven't, after all).
And in retrospect of having read the first several chapters, that opening image of Byron caught between two entities of primal significance is important. I did remember motorcycle woman when she reentered the story, and knew that she was some kind of counterpart to the old man. The structure of the opening accomplished that. It made the right promises about the story, and the story kept them. That's all an opening has to do.
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