Weekly Writing Challenge
Beginnings are important. As everyone knows, you have to hook your reader early on in order to keep them interested. So, here's the task for the week - I'll select a number of my favourite novel beginnings and post the first sentence or two. You pick one and expand it into a paragraph. If you can hook me, you get cool points. If you can hook me more effectively than the actual author did, well, I'll have to trade in all of my worldly possessions so that I have enough cool points to give you. Have fun.
1. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
2. Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself.
3. Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair.
4. I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.
5. All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
1. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
2. Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself.
3. Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair.
4. I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.
5. All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
2 Comments:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, lacking even the most rudimentary signs of life and intelligence; the FOX network. But alas, the sky doesn't come with a remote control, leaving us with no choice but to watch what we're dealt.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. "They're all leaving," he said in that dead voice of his, leaving no space for doubt between the words. Each tiny black dot a spacecraft carrying wives, husbands, children away from this place, out into the dull grey void. "Are you sure you want to stay?" His voice still deadpan dull, for he already knew the answer.
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