/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11011845]

First lines

[Anonymous No.11011869]

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times..."

[Anonymous No.11011879]

>>11011845
I don't really like openings like this. It's the literary equivalent of clickbait.

[Anonymous No.11011889]

>Justice? --- You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

[Anonymous No.11011929]

>>11011879

"But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential.

You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one. Frontload and cut out everything extraneous.

That's why I like short stories. You're always trying to keep the person interested. In fiction, you don't need to have the facts up front, but you have to have something that will grab the reader right away. It can be your voice.

Some writers feel that when they write, there are people out there who just can't wait to hear everything they have to say. But I go in with the opposite attitude, the expectation that they're just dying to get away from me.

There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I'm not one of them. So I respond to that.

Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone's life better, or make anyone's day better? And I don't mean the writer's day.

[Amy Hempel]

[Anonymous No.11011954]

>>11011845
>barely knew nearly accidentally
dear god that is nails on a chalkboard. im not even one to fall for the no adverbs meme, but this is the exact reason that rule exists. this is one of the worst opening lines ive ever read, including everything posted in critique threads. in some ways worse than "CRASH!" since that at least expresses a coherent chain of thought, while this one is nothing more than "put two really UNEXPECTED things together to really SURPRISE your read so they'll want to KEEP READING!!!"
>haha the summer i finally beat the last star world level in super mario world, i was violently molested by my papa tio.
am i doing it right

[Anonymous No.11011957]

>>11011879
Art-> Clickbait-> Art

[Anonymous No.11011961]

>There was just one enemy left - two, if you counted God.

[Anonymous No.11011972]

>>11011961
Holy...

[Anonymous No.11011975]

>>11011961
holy... i want more

[Anonymous No.11012002]

>>11011954
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

[Anonymous No.11012014]

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

[Anonymous No.11012035]

"Among the objectives which the study of political economy and sociology may have, the following three may be described briefly: 1. This study may consist of gathering together prescriptions which are useful to private individuals and public authorities in their economic and social activity."

ABSOLUTELY RIVETING

OH. MY. GOD.

/sarcasm

[Anonymous No.11012150]

>>11011954

She should have written:

"Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. A hand trails over the gunwale and he lies athwart the skiff, the toe of one sneaker plucking periodic dimples in the river with the boat’s slight cradling, drifting down beneath the bridge and slowly past the mudstained stanchions blablablablabla"

There are so many ways to write, stop talking about show don't tell, adverbs and other bullshit.

She has worked with Gordon Lish and Carver, and must take lessons... on adverbs?
KEK

[Anonymous No.11012174]

I feel like, for a board that wanks off Joyce as much as /lit/, we really don't give Rowling enough credit for her naming scheme. Dursley just sounds like a family of stodgy plebs.

[Anonymous No.11012180]

Mommy perished this day.

[Anonymous No.11012194]

>>11011929
and this is why journalists shouldn't write fiction

[Anonymous No.11012201]

>>11012194
Because they make meandering pseuds look bad?

[Anonymous No.11012204]

>>11011954
I always thought CRASH was basically ok. It's obviously not aspiring to be high literature, and it's decent enough for a comedic genre fiction book.

[Anonymous No.11012206]

>>11012194
>this is why journalists shouldn't write fiction
you sure about that

[Anonymous No.11012222]

>>11012194

[Anonymous No.11012289]

[Anonymous No.11012320]

>>11011929
>write as if you're an incredibly insecure people pleaser
wow good advice

[Anonymous No.11012346]

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

[Anonymous No.11012440]

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.

[Anonymous No.11012458]

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

[I Go !2HARVARdHk No.11012463]

>>11011845
One of my professors would apologize every time he pronounced vase the plebian way.

[Anonymous No.11012466]

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

[Anonymous No.11012479]

Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on
Archer Avenue in the winter of his
thirty-fifth year.

[Anonymous No.11012487]

SITTING beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come
from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’

[Anonymous No.11012506]

"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. There was little other motion: an occasional correction of the apparently aimless course by the slight raising or lowering of a pectoral fin - as a bird changed direction by dipping one wing and lifting the other. The eyes were sightless in the black, and the other senses transmitted nothing extraordinary to the small, primitive brain. The fish might have been asleep save for the movement dictated by countless millions of years of instinctive continuity: lacking the flotation bladder common to other fish and the fluttering flaps to push oxygen-bearing water through its gills, it survived only by moving. Once stopped, it would sink to the bottom and die of anoxia."

and when you reached the end only then will you realize the shark's death was spoiled in the first fucking paragraph

[Anonymous No.11012512]

Here come Charlie Brown. Good old Charlie Brown. Oh how I hate him.

[Anonymous No.11012745]

>>11011961
never gets old..
the original was:
>there was only one pancake left; two if you counted god.

[Anonymous No.11012847]

>>11011869
underrated kek and reference

[Anonymous No.11012853]

>>11012847
I laughed once and moved on. Reference humor is hardly worth that much.

[Anonymous No.11012874]

>Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

number 1 forever and ever

[Anonymous No.11012892]

>>11012874
What is it about Melville's writing that makes my heart beat so palpably?

[Anonymous No.11012896]

>>11012206
That's a fiction writer doing journalism

[Anonymous No.11012915]

>>11012892
>>11012874

John Gardner in "Becoming A Novelist" talks quite a bit about the opening of Moby Dick, basically holding it up as the supreme example of a writer who has attained perfect comfort and confidence in his own voice. He compares it to Melville's earlier work which is good but noticeably lacking in this wonderfully relaxed assurance.

[Anonymous No.11012940]

>>11011889
glad it's gaddis!

[Anonymous No.11012949]

>>11011869
fpbp as always.
Stay gold Ponyboy.

[Anonymous No.11012959]

>>11012222
i rest my case

[Anonymous No.11013358]

>>11012949
>mint
This is an American board, you Manc chav slut. Now show us dem tiddies.

[Anonymous No.11013372]

>>11011889
book?

[Anonymous No.11013375]

"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo"

[Anonymous No.11013385]

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a smile in his eyes that's halfway hopeful.

[Anonymous No.11013843]

>>11012206
brainlet

[Anonymous No.11014601]

>>11013372
A Frolic of his own - gaddis

[Anonymous No.11014630]

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita..."

La Vera Letteratura è Europa.
Altro che Moby Shit e DFW.

[Anonymous No.11014716]

>>11011845

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

[Anonymous No.11014741]

>>11011961
lmao what is this from

[Anonymous No.11014761]

>>11011929
For an argument on brevity, most of that was redundant. U can stop reading aftrr 2 sentences and still get it. God I hate the second person

[Anonymous No.11014767]

>>11012150
What is this post even saying? How much irony is being employed?

[Anonymous No.11014835]

>>11011845
She was a pretty girl, whose voice was sometimes pleasant to be heard. She was plain at everything else.

[Anonymous No.11014858]

>>11014716

How the hell is this at all true? Pretty dumb line desu.

[Anonymous No.11014860]

>>11011845
>Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.

[Anonymous No.11014893]

>>11014858
there are more different ways to be unhappy than to be happy

[Anonymous No.11015098]

Sometimes Tobias Bolton felt like a supervillain. The plate glass of his top-floor office looked out over most of the parts of Los Angeles that were worth looking at, especially Hollywood, and he liked to imagine all the little people hiding between the buildings wandering around on his little strings. They would like what he told them to like. They would watch who he told them to watch. They would give awards to the movies that he told them to give awards to. Most of all, they would give him money. They would give him money. They would give him money and thank him for the opportunity to give him that money, and beg him for more opportunities to give him even more money.

Eventually he stopped enjoying feeling like a supervillain, and then he would remind himself that he wasn't really a supervillain after all because he had no victims - not really. It was consensual. He didn't hold a gun to their head and demand their money. In that sense he was in fact a better person than even the most self-righteous moralising Senator or Congressman (and let's not pretend they don't have their own vices). No, Tobia Bolton was a good man. He was giving people what they wanted. All he asked was fair compensation. How could that be wrong?

...

>it goes on into a scene of Tobias getting a guy doing an audition to suck his dick for the part, a "you want the job or not" kind of thing.
>Tobias will rationalise this as "he simply values the opportunity to be famous more than his dignity so that makes it okay"

[Anonymous No.11015120]

>The woman pushed on the baby’s stomach and sucked its penis into her mouth; it was thinner than the American menthols she smoked and a bit slimy, like raw fish.

[Anonymous No.11015172]

>>11014741
some reddit critique thread, would you expect to see this in an actual novel?

[Anonymous No.11015583]

>>11012745
>>11011961

>there was only one pancake left; two if you counted the golden retriver.

[Anonymous No.11015599]

>>11014893
I disagree

[Anonymous No.11015603]

>>11015120
Woah.. this is provocative, nice...

[Anonymous No.11015624]

>>11013375
My hermano de color negro.

[Anonymous No.11016359]

How do you feel about opening a story with dialogue?

I wrote a story like that and my friend commented that he found it unappealing. He didn't like that he couldn't immediately identify and relate to the speaker because he didn't have prior knowledge of who they were.
I kind of liked throwing the reader into the middle of a conversation, leaving them to orient them self.
Maybe I didn't execute it well enough.

[Anonymous No.11017458]

[Anonymous No.11017507]

>>11017458
Now I unironically want to read more of this.

[Anonymous No.11017795]

>>11017458
Which one is this? Totalitarianism in a Tundra?

[Anonymous No.11018000]

>>11017458
Name of this book? Where can i buy it?

[Anonymous No.11018277]

>>11012014
I don't know how the rest of her writing holds up as the last HP book I read I must've been about 11 years old but this is a very good opener. I like it a lot.

[Anonymous No.11018382]

>Does cum-eating have any long term health benefits? “OY FUCKING CUMSWAPPER” “Writing is hard, okay?” Anon whined, while drinking a very good drink that he made at home by himself from a plastic cup. It was bitter and salty, the sensation of swallowing it reminded him of having a heavy cold. “Time for a pineapple diet,” he said to nobody in particular, the hum of his computer his solitary companion.
Absolutely legendary

[Anonymous No.11018387]

>>11017795
No its the latest one.

[Anonymous No.11018389]

>>11018387
Shit, I haven't worked on one of those since the Bugs one, how many have I missed?

[Anonymous No.11018834]

He sat at his desk, wearily watching the children file out of the room, reflecting that, this term at least, it was reasonable to assume that none of the girls was pregnant.

[Anonymous No.11018859]

>>11018834
Is this from Max Stirner's biography?

[Anonymous No.11018957]

>>11018277
That is probably the best bit of writing in the entire series.

[Anonymous No.11019108]

It was a nice day.
All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.

[Anonymous No.11019112]

Call me Ishmael

[Anonymous No.11019640]

>>11017507
>>11017795
>>11018000

L'anomie

[Anonymous No.11019696]

Some times--they were the worst; others were the best. This is a book called infinite jest

[Anonymous No.11019893]

Kind of cheating but:

>I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
>By the false azure in the windowpane

[Anonymous No.11019921]

>>11011845

>"Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say."

[Anonymous No.11020047]

>>11011929
Is this from a book titled "How to Write Shit"? It's like she ticked every item on the list of things that authors do that piss me off. If I catch you writing for the reader instead of for yourself, I'm dropping that shit. If you write to make my day--the reader's--better instead of making your own day better--strike that; if you're writing for anything else other than to make your own day ever so slightly less bad, I'm chucking that shit out. If you "frontload" your stuff, you're only letting me know I'm getting a truckload of trash.
My reading tastes are like a woman's mating instincts: if I smell you trying hard to make your every sentence appealing because you're afraid of losing me along the way, I lose interest. Be an asshole who doesn't give a fuck if I read you or not; make it all about yourself; be certain you're right and the rest are wrong and that it's worth saying so; write not for anyone out there but because you are unable to contain otherwise some of the hatred, frustration, fear, insecurity, torment, visions, demons, even misguided, misshaped love if it burns you--then you'll have my ears.
>Amy Hempel
No wonder I dropped this Lydia Davis wannabe's short stories collection. She writes like a man who to be liked by women too much.

[Anonymous No.11020163]

For a long time, I went to bed early.

[Anonymous No.11020180]

>Ancient Rome is important.
SPQR, Mary Beard

[Anonymous No.11020265]

>>11018834
>*were pregnant
Other than that, I want to read more

>>11020163
>>11019921
Also pretty good

[Anonymous No.11020326]

>>11012180
Hoje, a mãezinha está morta.

[Anonymous No.11020411]

>>11019893
yeah... kind of, and it's not even prose

[Anonymous No.11020936]

>The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.

[Anonymous No.11021284]

>>11016359

It can be slightly disorienting temporarily, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, if it's handled well. Think of it as "in medias res" taken to the max.
In a sense, William Faulkner does this but on a grand scale - when he keeps swapping from one narrator to another without warning and without any explanation to orient the reader.
Other, less extreme examples:
>Tom Sawyer
>Little Women
>Herzog (counts as dialogue in my opinion because it jumps straight into someone talking in his own head)

[Anonymous No.11021579]

El día en que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5.30 de la mañana para esperar el buque en el que llegaba el obispo.

[Anonymous No.11021678]

>>11020047
I read her whole quote, but only made it halfway through your post before getting bored, so maybe she's on to something