  Noticing Newbies
This week: Read to Learn to Write Edited by: esprit  
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"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time." -- Carl Sagan
"If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper."
~ T.S. Eliot
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Read to Learn to Write
Everyone knows if you don't hook a reader right in the beginning of the book, you might not hook them at all, and publishers definitely don't look beyond the beginning.
Make it impossible for them to not keep turning the pages until that opening scene - usually the entire first chapter-has reached a conclusive turning point, one that thrusts us eagerly into the following scene.
Steepen your learning curve.
A two-hour exercise that can change your writing career.
Go to a bookstore or library, or stay home and go to Amazon since readers are able to read the first few pages. Read the opening scene of as many books as you can. Just the opening scene.
Notice how and why it works. Or if it doesn't work for you - if you aren't hooked - try to determine why.
Notice how, often as not, the opening chapter kicks right off with the story's hero involved in a scene-specific little drama... and/or how that scenario introduces the thematic landscape of the story... and/or how the character is so vivid and compelling it almost doesn't matter what she or he is up to...yet.
You'll see it. You'll feel it. When you read several in one uninterrupted bookstore visit, and when you compare and contrast them, you'll notice and absorb the technique in a more enlightening way than when you read the opening of a novel you're intending to actually finish.
Because in a great book, the opening scene is often trumped by what follows. Which means you're likely to not remember and perhaps not even notice how it hooked you.
You need to notice. You need to see it unfold - strategically, structurally and creatively.
And when you do, you'll suddenly be aware of your job when you begin your next story.
Study the authors you like, the ones you most seek to be compared to, first and foremost. There's a reason behind your preference, and it stems from who you are as a writer as much as who you are as a reader.
Source:
http://storyfix.com/
Read good books, study them, take them apart. Study the characters, dialogue, sentence structure, tension. Read and learn to tell the difference between a good and a not so good book.
You might notice that this theme closely followed the same topic covered in
"Noticing Newbies Newsletter (June 9, 2010)" But it's excellent advice for those who truly want to learn for themselves how to write, so I chose to go ahead with it.
Thanks for reading,
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By: d.whedon
Comment: I have been asking for reviews, and I have received a few. A common statement is that the first chapter needs to quickly excite the reader. Is this a common view among all writers?
Well, I can say with certainty that it's a common view among all readers.
You can best find the answer to this question by analyzing what you like to read for enjoyment. Visit Amazon and find a few books that you haven't already read in your favorite genre/authors. Amazon will let you read the openings and hope they excite you into buying them. If the first pages didn't hook you, did you keep turning the pages? Would you spend 15 or 20 dollars hoping the good part was in the fifth chapter?
A writer can write a book his way but if readers don't find something quickly to make them want to read--they won't.
CHRISTMAS cub-BELLS R RINGING! 
Your host this week is esprit
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Noticing Newbies: June 30, 2010 Issue [#3834]
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