Marco Mazzoni “The Crying Light”
http://marcomazzoni.tumblr.com
Patrick Valenza from the Deviant Moon Tarot Deck. The Death Card.
Danielle Tunstall Photography
http://www.danielletunstall.com/
Unknown Artist
From Luis Royo’s Secrets collection
http://www.luisroyofantasy.com
Thomas Dodd
http://thomasdodd.com/
Christina Mrozik
Mark Ryden, “The Creatix”
www.markryden.com
Unknown Artist
How do you draw someone into you story? How do you make it so that the first line puts a hook in your reader and pulls them headlong into the story?
Let’s start with some of my favorite opening lines:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984
I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
The man who killed me wore a tattoo of Santa Claus on his chest. — Sean Taylor, Sin and Error Pinning in the short story collection, Show Me A Hero
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
I had my recurring dream last night. –Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
The strange children of the Manmensvitzender family did not go to school so we only knew they had moved into their old house on the hill because Bobby had watched them move in with their strange assortment of rocking chairs and goats. Mary Rickert– Bread and Bombs in the short story collection, Wastelands
There are countless other lines that I could include in here because opening lines are usually what I remember from a book or short story that I’ve read. Poetry also has its share of amazing first lines, but I want to focus on fiction in this post.
Now, what makes a line memorable? What puts the hook into you and makes you want to read further? There are several ways to create a hook, so let’s simplify and divide what hooks do into different categories.
1. Grabbing detail.
Something is striking in the opening sentence (like there being 13 hours in Orwell’s 1984) and that is what draws you in and makes you want to read more. The world seems familiar until it is turned on its head.
2. Action
You start in the middle of something, a fight, a crash, something dramatic happening. The reader is sucked in and wants to know what’s happening and why.
3. Mystery
Something is amiss. Something strange or unexplained is brought up that makes the reader wonder. Usually this ties in to a main plot point or at least an important aspect of the story.
There needs to be an element of wonder and intrigue to the opening line. There need to be details that spark your reader’s imagination. There isn’t a single way to do that. Just like a writer’s imagination can go in a million directions, a reader’s imagination will grab onto a thousands of details for an interesting story. The main detail is to have something that can grab a reader’s attention.
Consider if a story started with:
The red flowers were blooming in the field.
Curious? Want to read more? Eh… maybe not. But…
The Sange bloomed a sharp red on the battle field as it sucked up the blood of the fallen men.
Now? Well, there’s more detail, more things to be curious about. We’ve also put together the idea that this is not Earth because of these strange flowers. All in one sentence.
Consider the opening line a promise to the reader. That line sets the tone for the story, what do you want to promise and how are you going to fulfill that promise?
Now, that’s not a complete list and not all opening lines will fall into one of these categories but in general those are all things that can make an opening line engaging. What are some of your favorite opening lines and why?
Tony Rauch
Tony Rauch
What was your first experience with writing?
In grade school. I used to write short chapter books and illustrate them. Also drawing pictures which then became stories, only drawn out pictographically. I liked the freedom of expression drawing and writing gave you. You could go anywhere, do anything, and discover or invent anything. When you’re younger there seems fewer rules or limits.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I never have. I guess because I get paid so little for it. Writing is just a hobby, to keep that side of the brain going. If I was being read by thousands and thousands of readers and getting paid for it, then I guess I’d consider myself a “real” writer, or a “professional” writer.
Mostly I think of myself as an artist. I used to paint a lot. But painting is expensive, takes up a lot of space, and once finished a painting will only be seen by a few people. Writing is more democratic. It can be seen by many many people. Writing takes up less space and money. I think of a lot of my stories as paintings, only written down. I’m more of a painter or designer, a conceptual artist, but with words.
What inspired you to write your first book?
I helped start a journal that needed content. So I was always feeding them stories. I kept getting ideas and curiosity about form and structure, about content and mixing genres. So I kept generating material. Finally the journal wanted to put out books and I had a ton of interesting material, so eventually they formatted those stories into book form and that became my first book. So I guess it was knowing the right people, hanging out in the right circles, and having a volume of material to draw from that resulted in my first book. Also the press had a desire to publish that type of material, and it was of good quality and original.
I was more concerned about building a body of work, like a painter or composer would I guess, than constantly thinking about a single collection of stories. I guess I was operating on a broader level. Mostly because there’s always a “Well, now what?” factor involved with these things. Once a book is published, you have to have something else to do, to work on. So I made sure I had several series of stories I could try to get published. This seems to work for me, and I always like that there is something next, another bridge to cross, more stories to look forward to.
Do you see writing as your career?
I would not be able to support myself on writing alone. Maybe if I was also teaching, though teaching jobs are rare here. For me that would be a daunting challenge. It seems like there are many things impeding that progress. It is a very competitive and crowded field. I’m very isolated living in Minneapolis. Who would ever hear of me? How would they hear of me? How could I create, reach, and grow an audience? Most readers don’t read short stories. And I work in a niche genre, not a broad, general one (things are bleak, I’m doomed. Oh, wait, no. no I’m not. I feel ok. I think I’ll be fine).
If I wrote on assignment, then I would be writing what someone else wants or has already thought up. Then it would be work and not Art or a hobby anymore. I would get tired of it. As it is, I can walk away any time and write whatever I want to write. I like that freedom. Plus in my career/day job I am good at what I do and enjoy that work most of the time.
What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?
When I’m really going I write at least an hour a day, if not an hour and a half. That’s probably a good time frame for short stories. In that time there is a sense of purpose and direction in that I have to make that time count. I can make money, but I can’t make more time, so I have to be very efficient. And I have gotten faster at thinking through ideas and typing, so I’m more proficient, more efficient now than I was fifteen years ago, which feels like yesterday.
I can think of things to write about all day long – at work, on the bus, walking my dog, doing the dishes – and then I type that up. So that’s a pretty efficient process and a way to avoid burn-out or writer’s block. That’s what works for me.
The main thing is marketing. I have a publisher that seems committed to my work, at least through the short term. I have more than enough ideas, notes, outlines, and pieces that are started – all stored up. So now the main concern is marketing. There are only so many places to send press releases to and only so many hours to do it in. So that is the crunch at this time – marketing.
Do you have any advice for other writers?
Probably the same advice any other writer would give as it is tried and true – Just be yourself. Write what you want, what you like, what you want to see. Don’t copy what has already been done. Bring what you want to the story, what you’re looking for. Put your own ideas in there. Play around with things – form, content, styles. Mix things up. Combine previously unrelated things to create something new. Have fun. Mail me some money. Bake me a cake. Listen to loud rock and roll music. Send your mother and grandmother some flowers. Write every day. Read a lot. Send your work out. And as always, a cake would be nice. I think it would help a great deal.
We are also lucky enough to get some information about Tony Rauch’s new collection that will be out this spring.
– as i floated in the jar –
A 177 page short story collection of imaginative, whimsical, dreamy, absurd, surreal fantasy, sci fi, and fairy tale adventures. These fables will make great story starters for young adults and reluctant readers. Some of the pieces are absurdist or surreal adventures that hearken back to imaginative absurdism, sci-fi, and fantasy of the 1950s.
With themes of longing, discovery, secrets, escape, eeriness, surprises, and strange happenings in everyday life, readers will delight in these brief but wondrous adventures –
- a lonely girl finds a small spaceship in the woods.
- a stranger extracts a baby from a man waiting for the bus.
- a farmer invents gadgets to fight off infiltrators leaking in from another dimension.
- a jar falls from a passing wagon, spilling a strange liquid that turns a mud puddle into something else.
- a gang travels into the past to escape a regression plague that slowly turns people back into primates.
- strange creatures abduct a man and try to sell him to a different set of strange creatures.
- a man gets a verbally abusive amorphous blob as a roommate.
These and other adventures await the adventurous reader.
Samples can be found at –
So after a much longer hiatus than I intended, I am back to blogging. My apologies for disappearing for so long, life got complicated and I wasn’t quite able to juggle it as well as usual. But, I return after finishing up my second semester of graduate school (dear God I have several more semester to live through…) and am happy to be back!
The blog will be returning (at least for now) to its usual schedule of updating every Tuesday and Saturday. This Saturday will be featuring an interview with Tony Rauch.
I’d also love to have more requests from you about what you’d like me to post on. Any burning little questions you’d like to hear from me on?
Thanks for being paitent with me, and stick around, this show’s getting back off the ground.
I found this on tumblr and had to share. Regular posts will resume soon, thanks for your patience:
Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex at three in the morning. Or make love at four in the afternoon. They might not sleep at all. Or they might sleep right through the alarm and forget to get you up for work. Or call you home from work to kill a spider. Or refuse to speak to you after finding out you’ve never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. Or spend the last of the rent money on five kinds of soap. Or sell your textbooks for cash halfway through the semester. Or leave you love notes in your pockets. Or wash you pants with Post-It notes in the pockets so your laundry comes out covered in bits of wet paper. They might cry if the Post-It notes are unread all over your pants. It’s an unpredictable life.
But what happens if a writer falls in love with you?
This is a little more predictable. You will find your hemp necklace with the glass mushroom pendant around the neck of someone at a bus stop in a short story. Your favorite shoes will mysteriously disappear, and show up in a poem. The watch you always wear, the watch you own but never wear, the fact that you’ve never worn a watch: they suddenly belong to characters you’ve never known. And yet they’re you. They’re not you; they’re someone else entirely, but they toss their hair like you. They use the same colloquialisms as you. They scratch their nose when they lie like you. Sometimes they will be narrators; sometimes protagonists, sometimes villains. Sometimes they will be nobodies, an unimportant, static prop. This might amuse you at first. Or confuse you. You might be bewildered when books turn into mirrors. You might try to see yourself how your beloved writer sees you when you read a poem about someone who has your middle name or prose about someone who has never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. These poems and novels and short stories, they will scatter into the wind. You will wonder if you’re wandering through the pages of some story you’ve never even read. There’s no way to know. And no way to erase it. Even if you leave, a part of you will always be left behind.
If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.
Slipping into Laredo is like falling into a dreamy landscape that almost feels like a home through the looking glass. Life is similar but something entirely different and entirely Rauch’s. He is the master of this world and the way he loops his words together only adds to the dream world he is building.
Rauch is a master of wordcraft. He is able to, with just the softest turn of phrase, bring something alien into complete and clear focus. His narrators are honest and clear about the world around them. One of my favorite moments in the short story collection is in the story, “Once I saw a pretty girl”, where the narrator notes, “It was as if fate were calling out to me, as if it were giving me a chance to define myself, and how many times in life do we get a chance to define ourselves?”
These are bizarre worlds where girlfriends became ant-sized, extra arms and fingers appears, and people float away for no reason, but above all else, these are stories about people. Real people who face real issues of life in strange and fantastic ways that remind me of just how odd life can truly be at times.
This is Tony Rauch’s second collection of short stories, and I suggest you check it out asap. If you’ve got a taste for the strange, the thoughtful and the well-written then run on over and buy your own copy.
Life has gotten complicated with moving, school, job and family emergency so I am putting the blog on a brief hiatus. Sorry all. I hope to be back up and running at 100% soon.
So near the middle of this month I blew up my wordpress account and ended up with this blog disappearing and making itself private. I was trying to make a new blog for a class I’m in (and if you are in that class and are reading this then this is not the class blog you are looking for, go here instead )
*shrugs* The wonders of the internet I guess?
Anyways, since the wordpress site blew up and pretty much ate anything and everything in sight for the time it was out, I was unable to access any entries into the Scare My Pants Off contest… so…
I am re-launching the contest and extending it until NEXT Tuesday, Feburary 7th. For more details on the contest you can go here (or you know… scroll down on the main page….)
Now get to the scaring people!
