Opening sentence from your novel

Faulkner?

No I am just really boring.

I overslept the day they shot the President.

I actually like this, but it sounds familiar in a way that makes me think it's actually a parody of something, a Veeky Forums inside joke, or there's some other reason that I shouldn't like it.

Well it got me hooked, so congrats on that, but it almost feels punchy in a forced way

I was ill for a long time.

Really neat. Maybe use more grotesque descriptions of the shed and garden

I like this one

There is a confidence in starting with a short, simple line. Very nice.

“Mr chairman, unless something has changed in the last two hours, the law is subservient only to God. So unless you are to suggest that the head of the IRS is, in fact, God, I would demand an answer to the question that I have put to her, now, five times.”

Were you aiming for Dan Brown tier?

Great.

Best

Plain but gud.

Gud though like said.

Very gud. Favorite so far.

Long but gud incentivizing bite.

Doesn't feel like a first sentence for me but I do like it. The 'age eight' part is what throws it off for me. In a 2nd or later sentence it'd work for me but it doesn't as the 2nd and 3rd word of the sentence.

Too stuffy and unless the reader is already familiar with these characters ends up focusing more on them than on the adventure they are on.

Switch the 2nd part of the sentence with the first? Horse drawn cart traveled blah blah blah, the accomplished adventurer blah blah blah residing wi thin.

Vincent crossed the road, his determined, hard gaze not betraying his thoughts of the vermin scrambling to get away from him.

"It was a cold dark morning"

I'm dying

The vampire hung suspended by his wrists from chains that stretched his arms widely.

The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.

This is a good one

It's not an understatement to say I've never been much for adventure.

And then it leads into 60000 words of passive aggressive ranting about a foreign girl refusing to sleep with me.

I like it. Lots of character in that voice.

One day, or night, Abraham woke to a lacking sunlight.

It was a grand future when I was smoking my pipe, where steampunk reigned supreme, and women and minorities knew their place.

I poured only a little sugar into my porridge, because it was already sweet with honey.

yo Rivers Cuomo what up
sounds like the script to Van Helsing

You awake to the smell of semen leaching out of your butthole.

Could be good.

too long

too long, generic

i like it

okay

generic

a little too YA "punchy" but i feel as though the intention was good, just rephrase it a bit

like it

bad to start with dialogue

too much tell not enough show

generic

okay

generic

rhythm feels forced

kek

You're all bad at writing and should stop.

>All around the sound of crochets created an agreeable atmosphere.

The piece is titled "An Agreeable Interlude" after Joyce's line. The line is there to connect to the title so it seems like that is the reason why it's titled as such. In reality this is a trick because the theme is based on the post college drag many millennials experience for various reasons.

Crickets* not crotches. Autocorrect

>rhythm feels forced

As opposed to accidental, you fucking retard?

uh, yes? what else would it be?

don't be mad about writing poorly friend, just learn and try harder next time

You're an idiot

Not a novel but a longish short story I wrote over Christmas (the last thing I wrote; holy fuck it's been a dry season)

>My friend was a musician, the best I'd ever known (and I'd known a few); he was most at home on the piano, whose black and white plane he knew as a mother knows her child, and on whose slender length he could trace the steps of any existing work of any style or period, or set off into unmapped territory to effortlessly carve a way; he could play a guitar as well as the piano, or any stringed instrument for that matter, whose fine drills he made yield with a swift and unencumbered ease; he could be handed a strange and alien instrument, whose shape and form, whose dials and wires and bells and frets he'd till then never seen, and with five minutes of tinkering it would be as open to his influence as any other, as if he'd played it his whole life; he was often assailed to play this song or that, and would oblige if he knew it without exception, since he drew no distinction, as the philistines do, between high and low styles, and was as comfortable performing Charlie Mingus as he was Chopin; he did, however refuse to play brass or woodwind; he lacked the lung power, he said.

The style is deliberately grandiose and a little cloying, to communicate the narrator's inauthenticity , but I didn't want to overwhelm the reader with this and make it unreadable.

>The style is deliberately
If you feel the need to tell us that you're doing something on purpose, you might be doing something wrong.

"'Niggers' I read from my Mark Twain novel."

>communicate the narrator's inauthenticity

You mean, the author's?

Try:

>I overslept on the day I was supposed to shoot the president

What is this even trying to imply?

In a normal context yes, you would be right, but considering I've just given you a very small portion of the complete work, some things need to be clarified. I imagine an intelligent reader would be able to work out the style is deliberate by the end of the first page.

They overslept while the rest left.

>I imagine an intelligent reader would be able to work out the style is deliberate by the end of the first page

Nobody can even make it to the end of the first sentence.

This is all besides the fact it's an opening line thread and you have a while passage. Retard

>what are semi-colons

Could be boring but pretty good start.

It would take him two full days to get the joke but he laughed at it right away.

Neat, but not very evocative.

Wolfgang realized, with a sort of laugh, that every joke he had recently heard had been told by himself, to himself, and at his own expense.

Very good. I think you could tidy it up a bit, to make it sound a bit less clunky.

pathetic

On the third day, they realized they were being followed.

>not like its going anywhere

Blistering ice flew about the tundra, the incoming storm began its run in with the collapsed form propped up against the flat side of a boulder.

...

I just tend toward the purp my friendo

Toilets just tend towards the brown my friendo.

Holy fuck if that's what you consider purple prose you need to read something other than Raymond Carver like holy fuck man

thx m8

Jesus. I hope you haven't posted whatever the fuck you call prose.

fuck you nigger

np bb

I'm here for you.

>kek

I don't get it.

I am him and neither do I.

The fuck are you even trying to say, that isn't purple at all its just nonsense

>it was a cold and stormy night; the snow fell in torrents --- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up a collapsed form (for it is on a boulder that our form lies)

It's not nonsense, it's just purple.

It’s a shame about my pride and his selfishness; without those two resolute bastards, we could have stayed friends

Had James known that the punishment for mauling his history teacher would be nothing more than a lecture and two days without internet, he would have done it years ago.

I actually like this even though I don't understand Portuguese if that's the language. Something about a ghostly girls walking through the halls of a university?

Best ones so far

Gay boys with tight, muscular bodies, touching and feeling each other, their cocks hard and already oozing with precum, ready to shoot big, hot loads into wet mouths and tight assholes.

She, born pale, under that pale shaped moon.

>Mine isn't among the best

quads

don't worry lad it's my opinion, like everyone """"critiquing"""" what is perhaps the most unimportant part of a story

At least you got quads on a slow board.

I can't even find the motivation to write, not even with nice comfy music.
My head is bursting with ideas, I just can't get the words on paper in a way I like.

Just keep shitting it out. Phrase it ten different ways. You can always delete nine.

first draft should be garbage. Total shit. Just write it fast as fuck and get everything on the page. Don't worry about the words yet. Don't even think of it as the first draft. It's the zeroth draft. Assume you'll rewrite everything.

this

>I just can't get the words on paper in a way I like
>In a way I like
There's your problem.

You might like the idea of spewing out endless Dumas without fault. The reality is that it doesn't work that way. Write good ideas like shit, then edit, rephrase, edit etc. until you're happy with it.

Waking up to a loud crash rarely means something good is happening. It's never "CRASH! Mom made pancakes!" or "CRASH! We decided to adopt a Golden Retriever!"

Ya know what? You're right.

The best time to write has always been when I was too tired to overthink stuff but maybe I should start just actively not overthinking all this.
If everybody always waited until the perfect sentence or page or chapter just happened, nothing good would have ever been written down.

I'll give it a try. Thanks, mates.

Godspeed user, best of luck.

"Are we still soldiers?"

Which raises questions of it's own, is opening with dialogue good or bad?

Only one enemy remained; two if you counted God.

The reality with all these openings is that their either fit your own perspective or they don't. Out in the world you'll get millions of people saying a shit one is good, and a good one shit, and they're just as correct.

They're all great, I just think many are shit.

I whipped out my double barrelled katana and teleported behind naruto "nothing personal kidd xD" as his jaw dropped and i grinned like jack the ripper.

The fact that Bob had a name made him dangerous.

Depends.
Is it just a prologue, a Chapter 0?
In that case, depending on the genre you are going for, you can easily start by throwing the reader right into the 'action'.

If it's the first real sentence of Chapter 1, it has to be very good line of dialogue. One that pulls the reader in and, if possible, relates to the character saying it or the big overarching story.

For that line, I can see many ways to make it work really well. You could even be a smartass and answer that question on the very last page as the closing words.

In the end it all depends on what you are trying to achieve with these first few lines and how well you execute it.

There was a time when the dog would talk to me.

It is a prologue and a chapter 1 at the same time, it takes place five years before the main plot but does include a lot of important character interaction without being too expo-dump.

And I already thought ahead about being a smartass, the final line at the end of this freakin' saga is going to be:

>She was a soldier.

Referring to the same character. I do love a good book-end like that.

-user, The University of Anonymous is thrilled to have accepted you as a new student.-

"What am I supposed to think of this?"

The front door pet-flap opens letting in a black cat and a slight breeze.

>I don't know, just something I would probably start writing about.

His name makes him dangerous but it's a fairly uninspired name as far as names go.
Unless being fairly normal is part of the danger.

I like. Very much.

10/10

Just awful.

Hilarious.

Like this one. People will say opening with dialogue is bad, but can rarely explain why -- it's just English class dogma. Wouldn't say it's necessarily good either, it just depends on the line.

The first sentence was alright, but fuck off with that second sentence.

Soon to be a bestseller among self-published erotica e-books