It has to introduce your main character. You don't have to go into details, but you need enough to show if the MC is male or female, old or young, and ideally, give an idea of their personality. The opening has to show, or at least hint at, the inciting incident, the problem that starts the story for the MC. Most important, your opening has to grab the reader. Very few people have the patience to wade through pages of description before the action starts. Work on the first paragraph, and particularly the first line, until no-one can resist reading on. So, a few ways to get it wrong. Fuck the main character! This too is just for narcissist nincompoops who can't read about anything but themselves.
Before you scream that your reader won’t understand without a lot of explanation of what is going on, remember that this is the generation that watched the Matrix and Inception. Your reader is smart and will understand what is happening. Spending forty pages explaining the unnecessary is insulting to your reader. You call it smart to know all the tv cliches by heart? The XYZ generations, force fed with tv cliches from the cradle, are arguably the worst class retards so far in world history.
Interesting fact: the average reader will give up on a boring book by page seventeen. If you’ve wasted any of your precious first pages on boring stuff, you’re likely to join the Page Seventeen club too. TLDR, huh? Your kind better buy Marvel comic magazines. They got a lot of pics to help with the ALL CAPS text in the bubbles, and not much more pages than those 17.
There are lots of books out there. The reader has to decide quickly which one she is going to spend her time and money on. She's not going to buy something just because it might get good later on. Unless you have won a major prize or had a film made from your book, chances are your reader has never heard of you. She’s going to read a page or two and decide. If it’s on Amazon, she’s going to click “Look Inside” and read a few pages. Yep, "your reader" will do just that, being an analphabet in for mind-numbing pulp. "My reader" takes time to choose a book by its literary merits, not by its gaudy cover and advertising blurbs. And most likely from a public library on the recommendation of a friend. Preferably after reading the plot synopsis.
Have you ever watched American Idol or X factor at the audition stage? Then you'll know the way you can usually tell within five notes if the singer is actually able to sing and is likely to go through. It's the same with writing. Any writer who can't manage a decent opening is not likely to get much better a hundred pages on. Whining for a second chance because "I sing a lot better in the second verse" (or "The second chapter is really good") doesn't fool anyone. What an idiot. There are lots of books that start out slow but grow on you. But fuck you, you're just such an idiot that hardly has the patience to spell laboriously through the title. Right into the garbage can from the Amazon box if the cover does not please. Your kind had better just watch Netflix or HBO, or reruns of American Idiots and X Position.
“No such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories, including J.A. Schumpeter’s monumental 1,260-page History of Economic Analysis. Yet this non-existent theory* has become the object of denunciations from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the political arena. It has been attacked by Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton and Professor Peter Corning of Stanford, among others, and similar attacks have been repeated as far away as India. It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made.”
xxx/ellauri086.html on line 78: The carpet pages have motifs familiar from metalwork and jewellery that pair alongside bird and animal decoration. No pornographic details, worse luck. I chose to research these particular Gospels because they are the intermediary between the first truly Insular manuscripts, like the Book of Durrow, and the perhaps the greatest achievement of Insular manuscript production, the Book of Kells.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 277: WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? A case can be made for the view that “Persian” and “Elamite” are not two names for the same people but that having conquered Elam, Persia became the successor to Elam, whose original inhabitants, as Jeremiah’s prophecy indicates, have been scattered to the four winds and absent from the pages of history for over 2,500 years. Evidence of the difference in origin between the Elamites and the Persians came from the mouth of none other than Persian King Darius the Great who said, “I am Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of many countries and many people, the king of this expansive land, the son of Wishtaspa of Achaemenid, Persian, the son of a Persian, ‘Aryan’, from the Aryan race” (From Darius the Great’s Inscription in Naqshe-e-Rostam).
xxx/ellauri116.html on line 434: Ce recueil de réflexions et d’observations, sans ordre et presque sans suite, fut commencé pour complaire à une bonne mère qui sait penser. Je n’avais d’abord projeté qu’un mémoire de quelques pages; mon sujet m’entraînant malgré moi, ce mémoire devint insensiblement une espèce d’ouvrage trop gros, sans doute, pour ce qu’il contient, mais trop petit pour la matière qu’il traite. J’ai balancé longtemps à le publier; et souvent il m’a fait sentir, en y travaillant, qu’il ne suffit pas d’avoir écrit quelques brochures pour savoir composer un livre. Après de vains efforts pour mieux faire, je crois devoir le donner tel qu’il est, jugeant qu’il importe de tourner l’attention publique de ce côté-là; et que, quand mes idées seraient mauvaises, si j’en fais naître de bonnes à d’autres, je n’aurai pastout à fait perdu mon temps. Un homme qui, de sa retraite, jette ses feuilles dans le public, sans prôneurs, sans parti qui les défende, sans savoir même ce qu’on en pense ou ce qu’on en dit, ne doit pas craindre que, s’il se trompe, on admette ses erreurs sans examen.
xxx/ellauri120.html on line 114: All the pages it has added to our history books?
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 1045: Many a true word is spoken in jest, especially about the kinship between eros and thanatos. FUCK! KILL! Puuttuu enää EAT! The two closest glimpses Humbert gives us of his own self-hatred are not without their death wish—made explicit in the closing paragraphs—and their excremental aspects: "I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile." Two hundred pages later: "The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice." And then there's the offhand aside "Since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid …" in which it takes a moment to notice that "therapist" and "the rapist" are in direct apposition.
xxx/ellauri124.html on line 243: All the books above had unforgettable characters, great plot development, and told stories that kept me turning the pages. They also all had something to say about people and the human condition.
xxx/ellauri128.html on line 544: He had a good education at the lycée in Rouen, falling under the influence of a charismatic teacher, Émile-Auguste Chartier, known as “Alain.” Alain inspired other pupils, too, including Simone Weil and Raymond Aron, urging them to question received ideas. He gave Maurois a love of literature but also, perhaps surprisingly, urged him to take up the mill business after leaving school. Maurois did so, but in his Elbeuf office he kept a secret cupboard filled with Balzac novels and notebooks, and copied out pages of Stendhal to improve his writing style. He became a Kipling enthusiast, and learned excellent English. He travelled to Paris at least one day a week, and frequented brothels there.
xxx/ellauri129.html on line 447: I appreciate the novella has a plot, but this strength is not enough to overcome the story´s weaknesses, which for me were 1) overly long paragraphs of narrative--one went for almost six pages, and 2) a lack of understanding until almost halfway through the story what the stakes for the protagonist were.
xxx/ellauri129.html on line 626: En français. Couches semi-reliées. Les côtés marbrés. 131 pages. Ce titre est assez rare. Ils n'ont pas beaucoup de saletés. Les papiers de fin sont verts. Le couvercle arrière est bien fixé.
xxx/ellauri130.html on line 774: J'ai d'abord cru que c'était un carburateur et puis j'en ai lu quelques pages — et non, ça n'a pas carburé. C'est des espèces de loufoqueries consciencieuses comme en ferait un Méridional qui voudrait avoir l'air profond.
xxx/ellauri138.html on line 302: One day Philip handed me the manuscript of Notes for My Biographer. 'Take it,' he said, holding out the stack of pages held together by a large rubber band.'I want you to read it.' The book was a rebuttal to Claire Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House, Philip's ex-wife's account of their marriage, which was published in 1996. Many of the stories he'd already told me. He'd talked a lot to me about both Claire and his first wife, Margaret Martinson.
xxx/ellauri139.html on line 929: pagesperso-orange.fr/etudes/delamata06.html">Lähde
xxx/ellauri148.html on line 161: Tää oli Moshelta hyvä veto sikäli että nää lisäyxet päihittää kristinuskon tärkeimmät vetolaastarit, lunastuskaupan luottokortin ja taivastoivon. Maimonides further explains in his work on the Halakhic code, the Yad haHazaqa (“The Strong Hand”), also known as the Mishne Torah (Second Torah) the view of redemption and the role Messiah will play. Maimonides summarizes the Jewish expectation of the Messiah. But the expectation of Messiah, is not limited to Maimonides comments, quotes from the Talmud, Targum, Midrash, Zohar and other writings give us a vivid picture of the expectation in the Jewish world of the times of Messiah. Messianic expectation in Rabbinic times (A.D.135-1750) and in the time of Yeshua may have changed over the years. For example in the time of Yeshua, The Temple existed and Israel was not scattered abroad as is the case today. In the days of Maimonides, there was no Israel and no Temple, and Jews were persecuted in Europe. Here we quote from Raphael Patai’s work, The Messiah Texts on pages 322-327, his translation of the Mishne Torah, Maimonides writes the following.
xxx/ellauri157.html on line 243: The first leader of Lubavitch hasids, Schneur Zalman of Liadi kept in his desk some of his unpublished Hasidic mystical writings. A fire broke out that destroyed them. Afterwards, he asked if anyone had secretly copied them. His close associates replied that no one had, since he had written atop their pages the warning of "Joka tämän varastaa sitä piru rakastaa". Schneur replied "what has become of Hasidic self-sacrifice for the sake of Heaven?"
xxx/ellauri176.html on line 170: Et le merveilleux Paradou du roman, ce paradis panthéiste, cet hymne à la nature, à l'amour – ces paysages décrits par Zola perdent toute vibration, toute poésie. On croit voir défiler les pages du catalogue Vilmorin où s'ébattent Serge et une Albine issue du Petit Echo de la Mode. Le film projeté ne montre pas la séquence du grenier, la découvert des toilettes féminines – les nombreux changements de robe d'Albine sont, dès lors, gratuits, irritants. Comme tous les autres acteurs, Gillian Hills (Albine) est mal dirigée, elle n'a aucune grâce, aucun naturel. Francis Huster (Serge), lui, a du charisme mais son dur combat, sa douceur sont hélas surtout perceptibles par le fard qui rantôt ranime, tantôt creuse un visage que des zooms inutiles amènent en gros plan. Et pour avoir voulu donner aux paysages de la Sainte-Baume, du Lubéron, du Parc Floral d'Orléans une certaine unité, on aboutit à des tonalités froides, éteintes. Seules les intérieurs (l'église, la chambre de Serge, la salle à manger de la cure) gardent leurs contrastes, leurs valeurs. Les personnages n'existent guère, aucune vibration n'émane d'eux, ni de la nature cruelle ou triomphante, de ce Paradou, terre-mère bruissante de vie, féconde.
xxx/ellauri186.html on line 92: Subsequent hearings and trial, in the words of Walter A. McDougall, "drove Reconstruction off the front pages for two and a half years" and became "the most sensational 'he said, she said' in American history". On October 31, 1873, Plymouth Church excommunicated Theodore Tilton for "slandering" Beecher. The Council of Congregational Churches held a board of inquiry from March 9 to 29, 1874, to investigate the disfellowshipping of Tilton, and censured Plymouth Church for acting against Tilton without first examining the charges against Beecher. As of June 27, 1874, Plymouth Church established its own investigating committee which exonerated Beecher.Tilton then sued Beecher on civil charges of adultery. The Beecher-Tilton trial began in January 1875, and ended in July when the jurors deliberated for six days but were unable to reach a verdict. In February 1876, the Congregational church held a final hearing to exonerate Beecher.
xxx/ellauri187.html on line 143: Throughout 600 pages Freedman gives us encounter after encounter between Rilke and the women in his life, in which the women are flawless angels and Rilke a consummate villain. If Rilke's dear friend the great German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker found herself trapped in a stifling marriage, Rilke was a traitor for not extricating her. If Lou Andreas-Salomé told the young Rilke to go off somewhere because one of her other lovers was coming to visit, Rilke's anger was the symptom of an unbalanced psyche.
xxx/ellauri193.html on line 606: Eyvind Johnson’s The Days of His Grace is a historical novel, chronicling the lives of an extended family at the time of Charlemagne’s tumultuous reign. A sweeping saga always runs the risk of being too sweeping, but the novel’s only three hundred-something pages. Out of a possible ten points for literary genre, I give the not-overlong historical novel a seven.
xxx/ellauri199.html on line 159: From celestial cadaverous melody, bleeding branches of greenwood devastation haunt us in this very movement. Extraterrestrial Red Remoras of cathedral walks of darkness demand a rebellion against the planet. etc.etc. for pages on end.
xxx/ellauri224.html on line 341: What was this book even about??? The "narrator" kept jumping around with what he was talking about, quite a few times I had no idea who was speaking, and what was the point of all the billionaires? They had absolutely nothing to do with the story! It took 104 pages of confusing and pointless narrative for the guy to tell the girl (after 40 years of knowing her, no less) that he wanted to be with her. This might have been one of the most anti-climactic love stories I have ever read. The secondary characters seemed completely irrelevant to the plotline and it appeared that their only function was to take up printable space. The story was unimaginative, lacking in depth, and devoid of anything memorable. The only reason I bothered to finish it was to get one step closer to finishing my goodreads reading challenge, else I would have ditched it at page 20.
xxx/ellauri224.html on line 345: Ok, I tried. This novella is only about 100 pages long, but I got 10 pages in and I'm just not in any way interested. He's not Chinese, but he sort of looks like he's Chinese, so he goes to China for five years, but returns to Chicago to be near a woman he hasn't seen in 15 years because he's never been able to stop thinking about her, but then he's told he looks like he's Japanese, and gosh that's true! so he cuts his hair to look more Japanese, and he goes to a dinner party with rich people, then runs into the woman he's been pining over for 15 years and doesn't recognize her, and I just couldn't go any further. Another one off my shelf!
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xxx/ellauri293.html on line 406: Every week, around 8 million people worldwide visit our pages and over 100 million people engage with our content on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.
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xxx/ellauri304.html on line 401: What is a book about? About 200 pages, haha, but seriously: it's about me, 'cause all first novels are autobiographies. It'll talk about my trial, your funeral, and my triumph, how I survived it all and became a beacon of hope for the world, or at least my personal corner of it.
xxx/ellauri304.html on line 623: What to read? If you get no checks, read Writer’s Digest. Read the how-to books. If you want to read books on writing, you can’t find much better stuff then Stephen King on Writing, anything by Dean Koontz or Larry Block, a very specific mystery writing manual from Hallie Ephron (*1948), Writing Mysteries from MWA, a collection which includes me and my ex-partner, read my blogs and those about the writer’s soul by Molly Cochran. Read “Trial and Error”by Jack Woodford (+1971), one of the great commercial writing geniuses. And be sure to read my long time personal favorite book by one of my all time, all-star heroes, “Dare to be a Great Writer” by Leonard Bishop, which is not 300 pages of “rah-rah boys, go do it” but is instead 329 specific tips on how to get the trucks out of the garage in the morning. Fabulous. Reading and writing and remembering, are the only two of the three R’s that count. Who the hell cares about ‘rithmetic? Except Chuck Berry, who could count 6/8 time like a genius.
xxx/ellauri304.html on line 629: Suppose you want to write a “big book.” No genre junk for you. Okay. Here’s what you need to know. A “big book” is just a genre novel that got bigger. More pages, more everything. just make it a little bigger, a little more breathless, give it a little more end-of-the-world panache. Think of selling it to Hollywood where they call it high concept but what that really means is that it’s a very short outline of a book for people who can’t read a whole book or even a whole paragraph at once and their mind starts to wander after one sentence. Where was I? Ah yes:
xxx/ellauri312.html on line 1055: yaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwnnnnnn… my god, this is soooo boring. And there are still 10 pages. Daniel, dude, why did you make that so boring….. what?…… boring topic? No man, there’s no such thing as a boring topic. There’s just boring presentation… yeah… look, we’re live so I can’t explain that now but we’ll talk later, okay… … … cool… oh, can you fetch me a coffee? Thanks.
xxx/ellauri354.html on line 265: Professor Gianfranca Balestra of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) not only located the book but took the extraordinary trouble of having the whole thing xeroxed for me. Finally, in late 1995, I had the 288 pages of Il maiale nero: Rivelazioni e documenti in my hands. But what does it say? It's all in Italian! The puzzle was partially solved by Enzo Michelangeli: “Il Maiale Nero” is a novel written by Umberto Notari in the early 20th Century. His most famous book is the first he published in 1904, “Quelle signore” (“Those ladies”), about the world of prostitution: it earned him a prosecution for obscenity resulting in a fine, but the book was reprinted and by 1920 had sold more than half million copies.
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