Gilgamesh.Mytoy said:
Gilgamesh.Mairah said:
I picked up the book in Walmart, opened it, read the first paragraph and couldn't read anymore. The story may be ok, whatever, but that woman's writing style sucked, and the acting in the movies sucked.
You can't judge a book by the first paragraph...you just can't. lol
Infact you can and it's taught in any decent english class from high school to creative writing to advance journalism. The first paragraph, wait i'm sorry, the first line, must be the best line in the entire book save for the last. As a writer your goal is to do the following in your first line and first paragraph: Set the tone, structure, and pace for the entire book. Novels give much more freedom then say a biography given you are actually allowed to make up a great deal including grammer and words themselves. Novels are held to a different standard though that which makes a good one happens to be the first paragraph. The writer can increase and decrease this pace at any given chapter, but the first one needs to draw the reader in. Read the first line and paragraph of J.R.R. Tolkien's works (The Fellowship of the ring and The Hobbit), Anne Rice (The vampire Lestat), and Pride and Prejudice.
From The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole, and that means comfort."
Pay attention to this and why I've transcribed it. Your first paragraph is your first impression as an author, and you only get one. The reader doesn't know what a Hobbit is, and their imagination from the title alone has lead them to such ideas that it's a troll or boogeyman or alien. In this first paragraph our author has givin us the following information to go off of.
Our Hobbit lives in a hole.
This hobbit keeps a well to do place that isn't at all the kind of hole we'd imagine.
He enjoy's comfort, and thus, we as humans can instantly relate. So now our seemling completely unfamiliar subject of the title isn't so foreign to us.
In review I noticed this will come off preachy and that's not what I'm intending here. I just happen to be an author and book lover and pretty much enjoyed my A+ in english courses all through highschool and college. That being said about me, just understand that I felt the need to clarify that if one person isn't impressed with the first paragraph (the authors first impression to the reader, remember that) then thats quite fine, the rest of the book may be fantastic but if the reader is put off on the first paragraph and isn't willing to muscle through to the good part wherever it may appear, thats thier choice and to ask them to do so would turn a fun read into a school required reading and honestly, how many of those did we enjoy in school that otherwise would have been great reads had we chosen to read it.