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Comment by NickM | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think what might happen if something like this became really popular. I'd imagine many novels might start adding super oddball stuff in the first page, just to stand out from the crowd and pique peoples' curiosity. Kind of the literary equivalent to clickbait headlines.

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Something similar has happened in pop music - because on Spotify (and probably other streaming services, too) a play counts if you listen to at least 30 seconds, there's been a definite shift towards songs that start off with a pared down version of the main hook, or at least start their build much more obviously early on. There's fewer long, drawn out intros (which are normally saved just for videos now).

In fairness, wasn't this also true for radio? I recall quite a number of songs where the full version (from a CD or similar) had an intro that I'd never hear on the radio.

Pink Floyd, for one, released a couple of songs with very quiet intros. If you played the album versions people would think you were broadcasting dead air. Can’t have that. So just jump to the first sound over a certain decibel, and chop out anything longer than a second later in the song.

Which makes that Alannis Morisette song where she’s making a point about people not being able to handle silence pretty weird. The on air version has an “uncomfortable silence” that’s only around a second long...

People have short attention spans. Theaters had to post warnings for the last Star Wars film that it had several intentional seconds of silence, because people thought the movie must be broken[0].

https://variety.com/2017/film/news/star-wars-the-last-jedi-a...

I saw that warning in the projectionist area, so projectionists didn't think the system was malfunctioning, phrased similarly to the one in that article. I wonder if those theatres just put the sign in the wrong place, or thought it was supposed to be public when it wasn't.

Crews-Offerman in 2020, with Offerman spearheading a War on Boredom that is just him insisting everybody should grow the fuck up and be able to sit quietly for at least 10 seconds at a time.

It's weird, I was not bothered at all, because the silence in that scene is particularly fitting.

TIL "radio edit" will not only edit the profanity, runtime/structure, but also the lyrics.

I heard this song today, and was surprised to hear my local state included in one of the verses:

e.g. One Republic - Good Life

  To my friends in New York, I say hello  
  To my friends in Utah "they don't know"

Ah, always wondered why the Chainsmokers had stolen the mattress from Boulder. Now I know.

I had always assumed this was the case for some songs.

The radio edit. It's not just for bleeping out swear words.

"She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah..."

I think this might already happen. This is just anecdata but I often get turned off from books by overwrought first page(s). Eventually someone convines me to go back and the rest of the novel is good.

I'd love to hear an author's perspective on this, if any of them notice it. My guess is that they stew on opening passages for years before writing, causing them to get a little neurotic about them, then eventually they settle down and write in a way that comes more naturally to them for the rest of the book.

In pretty much any writing medium (novels, screenplays, short stories, etc), standard advice involves hooking the reader within the first paragraph or so. This is partly why "in medias res" tends to be such a popular opening technique - it drops the reader straight into the action, which is theoretically more interesting than "She woke up, got dressed, and went downstairs for her daily breakfast of toast and juice...". However, starting in medias res has itself become something of a cliche, to the point where you have to really know what you're doing to be able to use it effectively.

What I think a lot of novice writers, and people giving advice to novice writers, often miss is that "hooking" your reader doesn't mean immediately assualting them with action. All it means is raising a question the reader wants to know the answer to.

For example, "The Wizard Hunters" opens with the line "It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door." Not much action - Tremaine is sitting in a dusty library reading books - but that line raises two immediate questions: 1, why is Tremaine trying to kill herself in a way that would be ruled "natural causes", and 2, who's banging on the door at 9pm?

Similarly, "Black Sun Rising", the first book of the Coldfire Trilogy, opens with the line "She wondered why she was afraid to go home." Again, the line raises multiple questions, inviting the reader to keep reading to learn the answers.

My forever favorite opening line to a novel remains “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold”

How can you not want to keep reading after that? While at the same time it’s still at the beginning, not assaulting you with action, etc

God bless Hunter.

An interesting example, one of the best-known book openings in French literature ("Aujourd'hui, maman est morte."), and the difficulties translating the sentence in English: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...

Interesting article, and I believe I have a better translation: "Today, my mom died." It sounds better than just "mom" and seems to express the right level of closeness.

OTOH I think it's often appropriate to keep "mamma" in Italian movies and texts because it carries a huge amount of connotations, which "maman" doesn't.

> Interesting article, and I believe I have a better translation: "Today, my mom died."

Well it's not an accurate translation, 'my' create a distance between the narrator and the mother that you don't have in the original sentence.

You traduction is much more objective than what the author wrote.

"Mom" is US English only I think.

But then you have to translate for the majority of English-speaking countries that don't use 'mom'...

"Mum"'s the word.

Or if you use "mother" it changes the tone to be more preppy.

“Woke up, fell out of bed Dragged a comb across my head Found my way downstairs and drank a cup And looking up I noticed I was late Found my coat and grabbed my hat Made the bus in seconds flat Found my way upstairs and had a smoke Somebody spoke and I went into a dream”

A great example of "in media res" mildly weirdly implemented is the beginning of the second "Sin City" movie, wherein Marv wakes up next to a crashed cop car and some other vehicle, asking "how did I get here?" It's a weird implementation because it immediately goes into a flashback, but I wouldn't say it's a "poor" implementation because the effect is the viewer is introduced to Marv's memory issues.

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

- opening sentence of Iain Banks' The Crow Road

> "She woke up, got dressed, and went downstairs for her daily breakfast of toast and juice..."

It's been a long time since last time I read it, but isn't this essentially the opening of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?

I think you get the opening with the bit about the world being destroyed and losing the great idea for peace and whatnot, first.

edit: yep, there's a prologue which gives you the broader scope https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adam...

Writer's perspective - starting and ending a book are the top 2 hardest things, in my opinion, especially because editors get all up your ass about beginnings. I suspect this has to do with primacy principle, i.e.the editor is "most aware" during the beginning of the reading, and also aware that readers do the same thing. They will pick up the book in the bookstore and possibly skim the beginning to see if they should buy, so you gotta hook.

Other things I find difficult about writing:

Ending chapters (I saw a really bad one once in the Broken Earth trilogy that was basically "[character] realized she had nothing more to say, so she walked away." I totally understood how the author got herself in that situation lol)

Making decisions on tropes. For example, say I'm writing a sci fi with a "rise of the machines" plot point (I am). What is the nature of those machines? Rampant AI in existent technology? Did it make war-bots? Or maybe multiple rampant AIs in autonomous bots? Etc. There's like fifty of these kinds of decisions I need to make in a book I'm working on now.

Writing dialogue that's interesting, but not campy, but realistic, but not drab.

Did you ever see Throw Momma From the Train?

Crystal’s character has writers block because he is fixated on a good first sentence setting the tone for the rest of the novel, and he never gets past line one.

Stover's Caine's Law starts with an author's note: "Several parts of this story take place before the events depicted in Act of Atonement Book 1: Caine Black Knife. Other parts of this story take place after. Still other parts take place before and after both. Some parts may be imaginary, and some were real only temporarily, as they have subsequently unhappened."

That must have been driven by comments from initial readers, I suspect. Basically, some of the characters are rewriting the overall story of the series.

I do this too, and my wife thinks I'm insane. But I'm not really trying to judge if the book is good or bad. I just want to know if it's good. And there are more good books with good first few pages than I'll be able to read in my lifetime, so I don't really lose a lot by accidentally not reading a good book with bad first pages. On the other hand, by accepting bad first pages I risk having to suffer a whole bad book!

> then eventually they settle down and write in a way that comes more naturally to them for the rest of the book.

In game development, often you'll start with a random level from early-mid game, since that lets you playtest all of the gameplay. You then work forwards and return to the opening levels once the gameplay, art style etc. are all locked in and polished.

I wonder if some writers would benefit from a similar approach?

Yeah, read page sample(1:150, 1) of novels sounds like a better approach.

Funnily enough, there is a (French) Page 112 prize: https://www.prix-de-la-page-112.com/

Goodhart's Law:

> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[1] One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions which alter its outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Reminds me of this: http://bulwer-lytton.com/

"The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."

And, in a similar but shorter-winded vein, the Lyttle Lytton: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

Right. First few sentences:

Morgan's Steel Remains: "When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic questions."

Stephenson's Seveneves: "The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

Lawrence's Prince of Thorns: "Ravens! Always the ravens. They settled on the gables of the church even before the injured became the dead."

Stover's Caine's Law: "And in this My Dream, Beloved, you know Me. Through your eyes I watch your blunt and broken hands scrabble upon the marble stair: spiders maimed and bleeding on frosted glass."

Scalzi's Old Man's War: "I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army."

Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief: "As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk."

Well, that worked! Just reserved The Quantum Thief at the library.

I love his stuff. He creates an amazing world. Similar to Sterling and early Stross, but a very different path.

My all-time favorite opening line is from Spider Robinson's Lady Slings the Booze: "It was noon before they finished scraping Uncle Ernie off the dining room table."

My friend in college would read a random page from the first third of the book to make his decision. He found the first page to be too unreliable.

My roommate would read the last page of the book to find out if the book was worth his time. We thought he was nuts. Especially since he could read a novel in 3 hours anyway.

My way is to skim the book backwards. Keeps you from getting hooked by the narrative. You can decide in a few seconds whether it’s worth reading.

“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.” — Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner

This is actually largely already true for ebooks! The "Send a Free Sample" button on amazon.com for Kindle simulates this behavior (although you get a bit more than a page, and you obviously know which book you're reading).

My wife, who runs a book review blog[1] in her spare time, has a popular feature called "First Line Friday" where she features the first line of a book from her collection or her co-contributors', as a way to pique interest in the book among her followers. I sent her the link to this service just now and she loved it. She said it will be a great source for first lines for books she doesn't have but wants to feature.

[1] https://jessicasreadingroom.com/

A lot of young adult novels used to do it, and it turned me off books for long time as a kid. It felt like it was pandering to idiots.

Editors are known to only read the first few pages to make a decision on whether they even want to spend any time on a manuscript. The first pages of the book who survived going through an editor are designed to achieve that already.

Don't authors already put a lot of effort into the first line/paragraph/page?

The smart ones do. The same goes for emails, advertising copy, blogs, abstracts, elevator pitches, etc. Movies do it, too.

Why though? Is there something relating overall quality to first line engagement?

"The primroses were over" does nothing for me, but Watership Down is great!

Because people are deluged with information and need a good reason to invest the time looking past the beginning.

Amazon already does this. They allow you to download first n pages of as an ebook for free.

It's not the same thing. On amazon you judge a book by its cover. On this site you judge it by its content

You are judging the book on the basis of a page here. Not much different from judging the book on basis of the cover.

The two are very different. A book is mostly prose, in black and white, by the author. A cover is graphic design elements (and even the text is treated as a design element on the cover), most often in color, created by someone else.

Haven't people always read the first few pages when picking out books? It's even built into Amazon's "Look Inside This Book".

that's why judging a book by one page is basically impossible and will never actually become popular aside from a fun little project

You can judge writing style by reading only one page. Soemtimes that's a good indicator.

writing style, true. but i've also read some really bland books written by great authors. to each their own i guess

Looks like it's already happening. I see that some books are "promoted".

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