How to Write a Novel Opening 

I like that. Makes me wonder what happened and what's wrong with the old man.

Where are you posting the book? Drop a link here.

Tf

I love it!!

lose "well i was" too cocky for that situation.

x tonib x HAH

Hahaha

Fuuuck, love it. You could make the MC a little more likeable if the second sentence is more like "No one ever called me ordinary." But if he's a hotshot, got ego etc. then it's perfect as is.

@@PhoenixCrown great suggestion, that was the one part i was wondering if i could re word. Thanks

I want to read the first line to this lol

@@sethrakes1991 "She lay in the field with her velvety black hair fanned out around her. The scene would almost be pretty, were she not laying in a field of shit and bugs. "

Not that old trope 😴

Wish you the best of luck

-"Once upon a time" is banal. -"...it was a dark and stormy night" is cliche. -"Suddenly" has the exact opposite effect than intended here. It's also Tells, rather than Shows. Better to omit it and simply say, "A shot rang out." See how sudden that comes across without "suddenly" muddying it up?

The End

@Ayame Takahashi You know i was just feeling that as well yesterday after re reading and reading it again, Thanks for taking your time to leave your opinion!!! Ayame have a nice day!!!

@Ayame Takahashi Does it help you by telling it is a story of a boy who gets the visit of a crow and that crow tells him he has only 7 days to live. it is a story about logic vs faith/Belief

According to me it will be good but I am also ameture. I am here because I am going to start a novel

Would you mind if I share something with you related to my novel

Please let me know

A risk here is that this is overdone. A bigger risk is that people read this awesome action sequence, get curious about the character etc. and then you say PSYCHE it was all a dream hahaha! So if you use the dream, be sure it hints at or plays a bigger role in the narrative/plot/theme/world.

I also think this is just a way of saying, "Novels are good when written by good writers."

Be proud of your book! Your ability to already criticize it probably shows your growth as a writer. You published a book yo! Not many people do that. Just keep at it =)

@@PhoenixCrown that’s so sweet of you! Thank you!

yooooo im actually kinda curious, where can i read the book?

Sounds like you should focus on the fact that the woman knows the man. Is he some handsome guy she sees smiling at the coffee shop, but it turns out he's a government agent, cold blooded... or why is it important that she see his face? AND that she knows him? That sounds like your hook, not all of the violence--though that's sweet too =)

What is novella?

@@writer.Ashlesha Means a short novel.

Of course!

Have the hero losing, doubting he may be out of his depth, then find some inner resolve, and percieve an opportunity for a lucky strike.

@VZ You're welcome!

Try to have enough inner monologue that we understand the stakes, why MC is fighting, and what his motivations are. Action for the sake of action is boring. Need conflict and stakes.

Minor retrograde amnesia tends to be overused and can be a cliche unless you have the expertise to distract the reader with your talent. Would it be okay if she was away from the village picking firewood then returned through beautiful prose descriptions of the forest? ...reassuring the reader that you can be trusted to provide them with an immersive escapist experience with consistent imagery based on confident world building as you have gone to the trouble of drawing a map of the paths and rivers and rocky outcrops within the forest along with the location of its clearings and where crows are nesting, etc. all so it can be routinely revisited as a place, but not so you then put the map of the forest inside the front cover of your book like J.R.R.Tolkein did with his novel _The Hobbit_ as it is only important you do this world building so that you know and the scenes you have happen are all geographically located and you know how long it takes characters to travel from place to place within the forest, and you can do this again at a lower resolution for the simpler "open ground" that would lay outside of the forest paths if the story takes you out of the forest across the country to a town, but then you would need to have a high resolution map for that town if your character was to spend substantial time in it... This would require a change where your character wasn't a witness to the attack on her village. She wouldn't need to have amnesia as she has no memory of the attack as she was out collecting firewood when it took place and too far away to see, hear, or smell it. You probably would want to do this in Summer so that there are leaves on the trees as the canopy of foliage would block out her seeing the smoke rising from her village when she initially turned back in that direction to return home. If you wanted a stronger first sentence hook you might set it in Winter so that: _She dropped the bundle of wood she had collected from the stark snow-laden forest when she saw a thick plume of black smoke rising from the direction of her village._ That, however, is a LOT of information to hit the reader with, which is why I think your set up better suits an opening paragraph, or two, of excellent prose description, making the reader feel comfortable with spending a lot of time in this forest due to its inherent natural beauty, and establishing a baseline where the protagonist is having what is a normal day for them and is happy with how things are, until the inciting incident comes late in the second paragraph and turns their whole world upside-down. There is no need to mention their relationships to those who may be dead in the village, in these two paragraphs as that would just risk tipping off experienced readers to your surprise twist. If I read that X loves Y it immediately makes me think that something bad is going to then happen to Y as it did in _Romeo and Juliet._ Not that it has to, but I am not surprised if it does. So, talking about the village elders only makes sense if she has been sent into the forest to kill a monster that has been eating all of their goats. This scenario would start her in the Jungian Unknown. Whereas you need to initially hide this from the reader and have it so that she thinks she is in the Jungian Known, collecting firewood. Everything is normal, for her, until she turns back in the direction of the village, and if you want her to be on her return journey at the outset just set it in Summer so the canopy of leaves blocks any obvious rising smoke. She now doesn't know who attacked her village. That is okay. This is called a mystery. She will find clues and investigate and take revenge. I recommend you go see _The Batman._

That’s so good! One of mine starts with my MC torturing killing then burning someone alive all the while introducing herself and then riding off on her Ducati lol. Some reason this reminded me of that.

I agree with the other comment be very careful with amnesia. Can be done right but overused. As far as the intro, yes that can work. If your book opens with a beautiful nature scene, does that somehow reflect a theme in your book? Does the MC just want to get away from it all and live in the woods? But violence follows her? Think of how you're setting the scene for the whole book.

I'm sure it depends. My epic fantasy is largely around the theme of inequality and other human tendencies. My beginning needs to show this disparity for the narrative to hit home. Action can definitely grab attention, but if you don't know the characters at all, it can easily fall flat imo.

@@PhoenixCrown What you do is pace the introduction of the character by alternating action and background, in short spurts. Or, integrating the requisite background description into the description of action, again, in small doses.

@@PhoenixCrown You must JUDGE how much background to integrate as the action unfolds, and how to pace it and phase it, how to create a rhythm so that it provides sufficient context while still moving things forward.

I'm going to be one soon

@@karateabdulsaleem4957 good luck with that.

Aspiring to be one. I do poetry and stuff. Writing other stuff feels overwhelming.