Post the opening line of your short story or novel and other anons will tell you if they would continue reading or not

>Impatiently growing out of the plant's leaves in the foyer the tentacles splashed against

>I hung out with the two 15 year old chicks
Fine so far

>all day today.
ok

>It was fun,
Obviously…

>probably the most fun I've had in a while,
Sure as hell; they were 15 after all. Can you start describing their tits now already pls -

>which some might say is sad.
???
Dunno man, with that attitude just get a noose already maybe(?)

Really makes no sense to judge literature by its first lines,op. this thread is redundant

Every great book has great opening lines

"muh opening line" is the 2nd biggest meme with which they program you in your intro to composition class.
Only one bigger is "don't show tell"

I should probably delete the pictures I found of Sarah and Tara.

I woke up one morning in Paris, strangely aware of just exactly where I was.

What’s sadder than a guy still in his 20’s who already knows that he peaked in high school?

>strangely aware of just exactly where I was.

get rid of "just"

20 year olds trying to define peaking.

For women this might be true but you've got literally 20 more years to be a big dick swinging asshole.

This.

these threads should be organized around the principle of "Veeky Forums aphorisms," not "opening line to new novel"

"opening line" is a gimmick

I like that better, thank you

>Ultimately, fear is what keeps me down.

I didn't sex them(even tho it would be legal for me where I live). I'm too autistic.

"Here's to the last time I smoke!" I cheered before burning to ash.

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies that are attached to one another and definitely not dismembered.

Curious.

Really funny one.

Really?

Mine is in french, here's the translation:
>Antoine Massimo never really had a stomach problem before, despite all the liquid food he absorbed.

Kind of weird, sounds amateur and vulgar. Your tone shifts too quickly from informal to surreal. It suggests you don't know how to pace.
holy shit that's fuckin hot yo 10/10 continue
I would suggest not starting with dialogue because it can be offputting to the reader
You're getting there, but be more descriptive. What sky? Where? Is it cloudy? Is it windy? Are there people around?
You started in medias res (in the middle of the narrative), so I would expect the story to be exciting, or at least interesting. Instead it's bland, unspecific, and not relatable. Who are the fifteen year old girls? Why not introduce them first, or why not explain how the protagonist became so depressed, instead of presenting it as a fact closed to interpretation
Starting the first sentence of the novel with a gerund clause is confusing. We dont find out what or who is committing the action until reaching the middle of the sentence

Jacob stared out the window of the Chinese restaurant, not paying attention to the chattering of his companion while thinking about his appearance to the outside.

Arthur Beskows Aufenthalt im Haus der Fröhlichkeit, wie es von den einen Mitarbeitern immer und den anderen Mitarbeitern, die mit (genervt/gerunzelt) hochgezogenen Augenbrauen unlesbar auf Clipboards schrieben, manchmal genannt wurde, hatte nicht mehr als fünf Monate gedauert.

The sound of quick footsteps on polished marble resounded through the filtered blue light of a dark hallway.

Most of your analysis is retarded

Cassius Cuttlefish Blowpop III peered out the 23rd story window of his favorite coffee shop, sipping his favorite item on the menu: a supersized whale-feces espresso mixed with 180 milligrams of powdered methylphenidate. "This shit really doesn't have the same kick it used to have," he thought, watching the local Sunnis march around a holographic projection of the Kaaba by the hundreds in the square below.

I want to get fucked again.

>"This shit really doesn't have the same kick it used to have,"

get rid of "really." "Really" is the adverbial kissing cousin of "like": a filler word. Handle with care.

and get rid of the second "have," or rework the sentence such that you aren't using "have" twice

yeah I'd keep reading

poste en français pour voir

Our twin sun sets, as sauntering barges through whispering reeds approach Styraxis. Music floats across the river with fires and comfort coloring the evening. Finally, the day has gone and now we begin.

This is perfect.
Reminds me of the opening of In the Hand of Dante

Antoine Massimo n'avait jamais vraiment eu de problèmes d'estomac, malgré l’effroyable quantité de nourriture liquide qu'il ingérait.

your sentence structures are too uniform - needs variation in length and syntax. the third sentence is weak

i would rearrange this
>as sauntering barges through whispering reeds approach Styraxis.

to this

> as sauntering barges approach Styraxis through whispering reeds

and when you've done that you can painlessly get rid of the comma after "sun sets"

but also "our twin sun sets" is a bit confusing - is it two suns? if so, why not pluralize to 'suns set'. then it has a nicer ring; 'suns set' is closer phonetically to 'sunset'

who is involved with "our"? starting on a possessive pronoun is a tad goofy and maybe out of place in a visual landscapey scene - an intrusion of the subjective on the objective

read more Hobbes

>I picked up the glass of water that was filled with water, I then sat down in the chair under the ceiling and looked at the ceiling, I thought about life and where things bad went wrong in my life. I have 12 days to live.

"The drums are beatin and womans are singing. As lights were woozing and fluttering in the surroundings of us, i felt great joy and connection at the lovely beings called my friends. they were there and yet were here too and everywhere. I sat down on the floor and breathed in oxygen in a manner that was meant to create feelings of relaxation and ease. "Shit" i mumbled while feeling anxious due to the drugs i had taken a couple of hours before this moment. Nobody was looking at me i think but people were walking past me. I felt really tiny that moment, those large legs, a pretty mad sight how these bipedaled guys and gals were juggling their asses through this place, all assured and confident in themself. Some of them were dancing too in front of the singing girls and it was pretty loud in total. Kind of helped me to get a grip and refocus on what really mattered. I got up from that floor and turned around. All of that fuzz i said and pointed at a group of elderly woman who chatted at some corner of the place. I walked towards them and sat down on the table that they were surrounding. "What are you doing" Oldmom Hennessey asked me with eer eyes using glasses to sharpen her vision as to capture my figure in totality. I shifted my legs a bit and responded:"Hell, i just saw this damn fine table in some corner of the room and more importantly you damn fine ladies surrounding it and having a nice convo and i felt like i wanted to e a part of that. As to not give implications of any personal bias i seeked the position on this table which would place me right in the center of your thing or whatever it is." the womans nodded understandingly and one got out a handkerchief and waved it at me as some people do when they say goodbye to their husbands on a train to iwo jima and i waved my hands as to play along and the woman who waved her handkerchief started crying and used said handkerchief to dry her tears and the ladies took care of her and patted her and consoled her and i was moving away in sai train still looking back through the glass, being unmoved as a soldier ought to be though my heart was mourning. I had grown up in a rural town and the crying old lady was my grandmother who had taken care of me after my parents had been killed in a police breakdown on anarchist some time before i hit my 11th birthday. She was all i had since i wasn't very good with the ladies and also ot with the gays and i was undetermined in regards to seeking friendship as i was a firm believer in individuality and autonomy and tried to reduce the amount of relationships, which are always also limitations and restrictions to the least amount of people possible. It was more due to lazyness that i wasn't experimenting with more numbers, maybe 2 or 3 relationships, as just one relationship worked out. But now i was soldier, sitting on this table and seeing the old ladies moving away in the distance and i figured that a new life was awaiting me" the girl with white hair said to m

Get rid of "the sound of." Active, yo.

has been wandering through the labyrinth of obscure village roads for too long at this point.

your stuff aint bad compadre

i scratch my head at you guys who post huge chunks of text though. this board is mostly scrubs but there are some formidable people; you never know who's reading these threads. you could find half a paragraph of your shit in someone else's book a year from now and there'd be no way to call them on it

thanks, that helps.

>It was at dawn that the inhabitants of Nola, a little village south here and the closest one to the first fire, saw themselves under a darkened yellow sky covered with a thick veil of acrid smoke that stole them of the sunlight for days.

"yeah well, it's no big deal" the man said with sunglasses and also a cigarette in his mouth
"I gush them out, left and right. It's peanuts. Here's how i do it: close my eyes and just type. If fellas wanna steal my stuff they can do it, i got new shit coming up tomorrow." he threw away a cigarette and lighted another one. He looked at an american desert where lizards but als osnakes and skoripions resided permanently. He lighted another cigarette. "But thanks for the compliment compadre" he said and smiled into the sunsets. His wife angered by his reluctance to smoke shouted at him:" Skmooke moree. Smoke more cigarettes. Smoke more" She shuffled cigarettes out of her breast pocket and threw them at him and he lot his smilings and turned towards his wife and said:"Stop telling me what to do. Stop doing that. I'm smoking more than enough cigarettes." But she was unwavering, she was like an UNMOVING MOUNTAIN. He took of his sunglasses and eyed her with implicit will to destroy. She ran towards him for 2 metres and hshoved with no respect or second thoughts 3 cigarettes right into his open mouth. "YOU EAT THEM FUCKER" she shouted. And he did so, being overwhelmed by just how brutal his wife could be, unscared and unflinching even in the face of male thirst for annihilation. He ate them good and then swalloed them and looked ashamed at the ground and mumbled: I won't put up with this much more. I won't do this, it doesn't do" he then said a bit more loudly with an air of resistance "I want to be treated with respect. I'm the man of the house. I'm the person with a penis here." but she just alughed and walked down a stair intoa cave where baskets with water where living and also a white pale computer programmer was sitting infront of an Alienware desktop pc and was playing Age of Empires HD and he was playing with the Incas who had ferocious melee warriors and some decent bureacratic organization but were low on intelligence levels and easily spooked. His strategy was to first colonize america, before the whites could do it, and then mass produce coastal defenses, making use of some tight gearing bonus provided by the drafted army policy of his nation and would just pop inca militias next on every coastal province waiting for those whiteys to arrive and to slaughter them. The wife didn't mind him for he was a what others may call a Freak. As a matter of fact he was just an infantile idiot but whatever, i think it's understandable that to people of older generations what for us just seems like a guy stuck in his teens or trying to relive his childhood years, is a deeply alien and frightening creature. Thus when i say she didn't mind him, it's more of an active process of ignoring, of keeping him out of her mind. This was only allowed to live here by the goodwill of her husband who had found the pale white boy in the corpses of several dead large scorpions. He reassembled him with his Toys R'Us Manly Man Toolset and gave him a haunted indian s

i tip my hat to you sir. eating the cigarettes was a little too cute but otherwise you can consider my grin shit-eating

keep doing what you're doing. i would pay 5 bucks to read the final draft, and that's saying something because i steal everything i can

The Shroud is beautiful this time of day, at sunset.

Quick footsteps on polished marble resounded through the filtered blue light of a dark hallway. The clack of shoes grew in volume as a figure pushed through with purpose, its silhouette marked by a wide-brimmed pointed hat and a long coat. Glowing vials of color jostled on the coat as they reached a vast set of iron doors. They seemed to stretch into the darkness above as two dim torches of crystal revealed a myriad of patterns and runes.

The figure extended a hand, and a similar pattern shimmered into the air before it. In response, the patterns of the door lit up. The colossal entryway swung open with eerie silence. Ahead was a great round chamber. A single ray of sunlight made a small circle in the center, while deeply tinted windows retained the same blue as the hallway before. There was a ring above the center, and figures could be seen stirring behind podiums wrapped in shadow. The one across from the door stood, and addressed the one entering with a dry, weathered voice, "Miss Estalise, step forward into the light."

My dad is sitting on the sofa watching football, wearing his old slippers and the jersey, and he says: My old woman is sitting in the kitchen singing like a sparrow.

227 days before his death, adam decided to kill himself.

Sparrows don't really sing. Is the lady making short chirping noises?

yeah that's the joke

Okay.

10/10

(OP)
>I was standing on the balcony of an old opera house, hollowed out to make room for angry music and angrier sex.

is this cringe?
>Sure, Ada and Naomi were beautiful women, but that didn't hide their ignorance.

no, but it's also not a hook

honestly it is

>On the floor there was a fork, and on the fork there was an eyeball

While he waited for the subway, imagining the woman, a flood came and devoured all of New York.

Alright, now that's a hook.

Still stand ich vor dem weißen Jüngling.

Not really exciting.

I have wandered this realm alone for well-nigh a decade, my tales and songs my sole companions joined to my side like an undying shadow. The road and its many stories has aptly served as my surrogate family--I have made for myself a home without borders among the sun-bathed stone and weathered signposts.

Barron Trump spun his cosmic fidget spinner opening a portal to the past, a smug flat smile- inherited from his father- marked his face for he knew: the cyber communists were fucking doomed.

Looking at the garden of 26 Vicarage Avenue you would think the plants within had been planted already dead.

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned" he murmurs as a tear drips onto the masonry, echoing across the abbey.

It was a dark and stormy night.

I like this one, seems like it should have been ben shapiros book rather than thr crap bag he produced.

Did you just made "Nola" up or are you writing from Italy?

It lies down in the gloom and splashes around for a few minutes in the ooze that it can hardly see with its blind, lacteal eyes. Devoided of any time perception, it can wait for whole hours watching its lifted arm, then lay it down gently in the mud or let it fall and feel through its thick scaly flesh the feeble feeling of dense rotting splashes of mush wet its chest. It breathes deeply and squints its eyes, as it dredges with its claw the bottom of the pit, looking for food.

It's translated from Italian, have mercy

>caring about opening lines
genre

Post original Italian

It was more of a dark awakening rather than a marvel to observe this angry beast, smiting the once mighty structures of Tokyo’s skyline in a of fire. Those who were unable to avoid it were dead in the street, rotting corpses with melting skin, or crushed by the falling remains of what was once a building or the foot of the beast itself. The one thing that was crushed the most, however was hope. In its place, defeat and loss occupied the hearts of those who stood in the far off distance, watching the homes of families become ash and rubble within a matter of seconds, all for the purpose of satisfying the creature’s devious want for man’s demise. Surely these poor people would live the rest of their days seeing the beast’s shadow behind a curtain of roaring fire, haunting them. It was a feeling of violation like no other; you would be opened, laid out with nothing to do except to receive punishment from that which delights in what it knows you fear worst and relishes in it for the sake of sick self-gratification.

Today was the rape of Tokyo.

Si sdraia nel buio e sguazza per alcuni minuti nella melma che può a stento vedere con i suoi occhi ciechi e lattei. Privo di qualsiasi percezione del tempo, può restare per ore intere ad osservare il suo braccio sollevato, rigirarlo nell’aria fetida e pesante, poi adagiarlo lentamente nel fango o lasciarlo cadere e sentire attraverso la pelle spessa e squamosa la flebile sensazione di densi schizzi di poltiglia marcescente bagnargli il torace. Inspira profondamente e socchiude gli occhi, mentre con la chela draga il fondo della pozza in cerca di cibo. Il cibo gli piace ancora vivo, mentre intorno gli si chiudono le sue fauci e sente i vani ultimi movimenti di ratti, pesci o rane che si agitano e sbattono contro la dentatura robusta. Prova una soddisfazione immensa nel sapere che quelle creature ora poggiano sulla sua lingua spugnosa, respirano il suo fiato che sa di marcio.

"With unprecedented ease the man slipped into the dark room, there rested upon the mahogany desk, which resided in the far end of the room, was a small candle."

I havent slept in 12 years and I feel great!

This is a good opening line. I like it.

Not really.

The third is muh worldbuilding; forth, dimensions of the character; fifth, character development for character development's sake; sixth, wrong interpretation of historical facts. And the list goes on and on...

Honestly, would read desu.

Only acceptable if the story is set at a bar serving ginger beer and rum specials.

I thought it was "show, don't tell".

golden retriever

Stately, plump Jack Slanders came from the basement, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a blade lay crossed.

>tfw your novel opens with the mc waking up

not worth a farthing

Why pussy fiened dreamed he blew a slew of hot wet steam supreme the woman of his dreams who bore the whore semblance of mothers rememberance was to cope with the wrecked rope his mother smothered her chocked neck with like she did his dick when he was just ten years old and still nobody knows and he often forgets to forget sufferings wet dreams so this morning he awakes from the pit of life's secret mistakes.

Carl knew that setting himself on fire was his only option; he wasn’t getting out of that traffic after all.

is that a rap about child abuse

i like this attitude. way less boring than "i haven't slept in 12 years and i'm having an existential crisis"

this is an unintelligible mess. cherry on top of the poop sunday is "was a small candle" - where? what? who?

"across the abbey" doesn't work, your default mental image of an abbey is a huge complex like a school or a hospital or a walled town, it doesn't make sense for a tear drop to echo across it.

would probably be better if "forgive me father..." just existed on its own without any antecedent description

That's the form it takes but it's really about the way in which unspeakable truths manifest themselves, unspeakable truths in general, the very essence of secrets too excruciatingly unnerving to utter yet too unbearably sublime to forget.

it wasn't a criticism per se. i enjoyed reading it.

i think you have a good ear and maybe good ideas too, but your discipline's a little shaky. if all of your sentences are this long and baroque i would get tired of reading your stuff pretty fast, ya feel me?

Lol thanks dad
srsly off the cuff naw mean

carry on then my friend