Image: wili_hybrid

You’ve heard it before: the first line of your story should be the best. It should be intriguing, maybe even poetic. Even in news writing, you’ll want your first paragraphs, or lead, to reach out and grab your readers before they move on to the next story.

But how true is all of this?

I thought it’d be interesting to take a quick look at the first lines of some well-known novels, and (in a later post) a few from Pulitzer Prize winning news articles to see how important that first line of your novel or article really is.

Here we go:

“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” – JD Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye

“‘Tom!’” – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.” – Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

““It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell, 1984

A good first line makes your reader ask questions (Who were in the streets? A pleasure to burn what? The clocks were striking thirteen? And who the heck is Tom? Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged even asks the question for us: “‘Who is John Galt?’”). It makes your reader want to learn more. Or it sets the tone for the novel. Or it hints at its theme. Or it introduces a character. A first line can do a lot of things, but at the very least it should do something. At the very least it should be interesting.

In the first line of Catcher In The Rye, for example, what we see is not the set up of plot or setting or theme, but a perfect introduction to the book’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield. From just this first line, we know how he talks, we know his attitude, we even (maybe) get a hint at his education (who the heck references David Copperfield? Well, Holden Caulfield, for one). This first line is interesting enough to make the reader want to listen a while longer and see what this guy is all about.

I truly believe that, in the case of great storytelling, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But the first line of your work is the first thing your reader will see when he or she is skipping through blogs or picking out novels at the book store. The authors of the first lines above knew this well.

You have to pull your readers in and not let go until they’ve finished. You have to get them to stick around, and that first line, that first impression, may be the only chance you get.

Image: Valeriana Solaris

Writing is just like any other skill: you have to practice to get better. You have to exercise. And if you don’t keep up that exercise, you’ll find your ability slowly wasting away.

When most think of writing exercises, they think of creative writing. Fiction. Literature. That’s a valid assumption, but doing writing exercises will help any type of writer improve his or her ability.

If you’re a journalist, for example, you can exercise your eye for observation by doing descriptive exercises. A memoirist can free-write on past experiences and characters in their lives. An essayist can brainstorm on random thoughts to spark new ideas for future topics.

In short, doing exercises will keep you prepared for when you truly need to sit down and get working.

You don’t have to scour the Internet for writing exercises, either: you can create your own. It’s not difficult. Sit down, relax, think of the first thing that hits your mind. The weather. The trees outside your window. Your reflection in the computer screen. Make a list of random words and write a story using them. Open a book and pull out a sentence, any sentence, and run with it. Write for maybe five or ten minutes, freely and without thought.

The key is to simply let your thoughts wander, and avoid critical thinking. Just write. It isn’t about writing something great or even coherent, it’s about putting words on paper. It’s about introspection. It’s about pure creativity.

A compendium of writing exercises

Every week, I’m going to post a new writing prompt or exercise, and add a link to it in this post.

Here’s one to get started:

1. I want you to sit down where you usually write. Think back to the moment you first decided you wanted to be a writer, and write for ten minutes about that moment. What sparked that initial desire? Was it a particular book you read, or story you heard? Were you inspired by someone? Do you even remember? For example, I probably caught the writing bug by playing so many video games as a kid and wanting to create my own stories. Examining why we started writing in the first place can tell us a lot about who we are as writers, and who we might become.

And the rest:

2. And around the corner comes…

Image: Sarah G...

I guess I never thought much about the reliability of online reviews. Sure, when I’m shopping around for computer hardware, I try to read between the lines (of reviews for, say, video cards) to make sure the reviewer knows what he or she is talking about. Their level of computer expertise. What kind of computer they were using in the first place. Those details are important but often left out.

So there’s certainly room for user error. And when it comes to books, movies, or music — well, those things are better left for each individual consumer to decide. Different tastes and all that.

The point is, you should always make your own decisions.

Still, you’d like to think each reviewer, whether they’re a professional critic or an Amazon shopper, is at least genuine in their intentions. Yet that was not the case in regards to certain negative reviews of books written by competitors of Orlando Figes.

The reviews were written by his wife.

Now there are calls for anonymous commenting and reviewing and blogging to be banished. Threats of libel. That won’t happen, and that’s really not the point. If there’s anything we should learn from this incident, it’s that no one review should be taken as fact. It is opinion, and a nuanced and subjective one at that. And, sometimes, it’s not even real.

I’m not going to waste time talking about how wrong it was for Orlando Figes’s wife to write negative reviews about his competitors. It’s the sort of thing that happens in an uncensored, open forum. It’s inevitable. But I’m very interested in the reaction this story has received by the authors whose books were targeted by the negative reviews.

Grab the torch and pitchfork!

Reviews should be used as guides, not guardrails, gently pushing you towards deciding whether or not something is worth further investigation. What they shouldn’t be, however, is censored. A writer gets his or her feelings hurt — so what. Their feelings are always hurting.

And yes, hate speech and actual libel are cause for concern, but in this case we’re talking about negative reviews in general.

“Not a man to be trifled with, Service sent an email to a dozen fellow historians…asking for their comments on “how to expunge the practice and expose the practitioners of malign electronic denunciation in countries of free expression” – The Independent, Historians wife and her poison pen expose dark side of literary criticism

That’s a very reactionary way to deal with this situation. A very unsafe way. Removing anonymity may make things better for the author, but it also removes truth from those reviews. A person will watch what they say when writing negative comments if their identity is revealed, because they will fear repercussion, and in so doing their comments will no longer be truthful.

And, at that point, they’re even more useless than when one guy’s wife decides to go on a virtual rampage in Amazon’s book department.

Sometimes, we just need to shrug and move on.

But what do you think? Should reviews remain anonymous, or should the authors of negative reviews be forced to share their identities to prevent malicious uses of the system?

Image: kyknoord

I think there’s a point in every aspiring writer’s life when he or she finally “gets it.” Not in the sense of a sudden, crystalizing moment or an epiphany, but a gradual realization of who they are.

Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for? What got me started, and where will it lead?

As a writer, ask yourself those questions. Answer them. And tell the truth: the worst thing you can do is lie.

In any endeavor, the one thing that will prevent success is a lack of purpose. Passion. A true, underlying motivation not created by superficial things like money or fame but driven by a desire to do something great.

Knowing, in this case, is half the battle: once you know why you’re doing something, you’re granted the peace of mind and determination to continue forward. If you don’t know why you want to write, or if you’re not truthful in your answers to the above questions, you will ultimately fail. You will lose your passion, and become lost in deadlines and word counts and writing schedules, and what should be creativity and fun and adventure will become monotony and boredom and work. Writing is work, of course, but that doesn’t mean it should be boring, or that it can’t be fun.

The other half of the battle is doing. We all know we want to write, and maybe we do from time to time, but until we hunker down in the trenches in front of the keyboard and become serious about writing as a profession, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters until you act.

Which brings me back to our aspiring writers. Most do write, but what they write they don’t consider writing. They don’t believe they’re “officially” writers. Some believe that, to be a writer, they need to be published. Others look at their literary heroes — Hemingway, Salinger, maybe King — and figure, until they can write as well as those heroes, they’ll never be anything more than hobbyists, hacks.

On they go, reading self-help books and browsing websites and blogs, hungry for writing tips. They’ll join special groups or go on retreats. They’ll enroll in classes. They’ll take tours of the houses where their heroes lived, visit graveyards where they’re buried, on an endless search for inspiration.

Then one day comes and that aspiring writer finds an old essay or short story, and recognizes how far she’s come and how much her ability has improved. Another will sit down to write and suddenly realize that it isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Yet another will decide, on a rainy Summer afternoon, to write something, just once, for himself and no one else, without worrying about the outcome.

And sooner or later, those aspiring writers really do “get it.” They know why they’re writing, and where they’ve been, and where they’re going. But most importantly, they realize that one simple truth: they were writers all along.

One thing I’ve noticed lately, though: spam comments are becoming a little more nuanced. They’re disguised as actual comments and not the gibberish (or Russian) I’m so used to seeing.

Maybe, just maybe, the spam robots have become sentient.

I hate spam

“You write very well.”

“Cool page!”

“I found this information very useful.”

All unassuming comments on their own. Hey, maybe they’re real! you think. Until you check the back-link and notice it goes to an insurance company or a foreign hotdog salesman. Sometimes they’re even longer than single sentences; paragraphs of superficial praise that might just cause the blogger to get lost in his or her own ego and let the spam slip through.

Now, I’m not really going to post tips on how to “write the perfect spam comment.” That would be spectacularly counter-intuitive. Instead, for the sake of all bloggers out there, here are some warning signs that a comment may be SPAM:

• A very short comment praising your work and/or congratulating you on a job well done

• A vague paragraph (probably on the short side) explaining how interesting the subject matter is

• A URL left by the commenter that points to a business or service

• An e-mail address unrelated to said business or service, or one that looks a little fishy

• Unintelligible use of your blog’s primary language

Sometimes a comment may contain these attributes and still be legitimate, so you have to use some intuition when separating the good from the bad. Even so, there’s really no point for someone to leave such a short and generic comment in the first place unless the commenter is looking for nothing more than a free link back to their website.

Last but not least, if you’re running a WordPress blog and you don’t have Akismet installed…install it. It will save you a lot of headaches.