Excellent. Idealism is your personal interest (and a well developed character is always a must, you will handle that in Hikaru's class), it's what really interests you. But what, exactly, draws you in? There in lies the potential problem. As you have just demonstrated, art is, indeed, an opinionated matter, but we must be careful not to misinterpret the distinguishing factors between
quality and
personal appreciation.
For interest, I can listen to something, hate it, and still say it's good without being, in the least bit, a liar or hypocritical. It can be not to my liking, but all together good in quality. A prime example of this is music. You can hate a song, but even so, it could be a very well produced, well mixed, and well preformed song. How "good" it is does not have anything to do with your opinion, but rather you like it or not does have to do with opinion.
In writing, though, we MUST factor in personal opinion. It is different from conventional art, because it is a form which your reader will spend considerate amounts of time on, picking apart. It is based not on visual pictures or videos, but on thought and text. In modern times, to be a successful writer, you must account for the opinion of the reader.
Of course, this is where genres come into play. While you can not group opinion of any work based off genre (saying "I hate rap" is an invalid statement because you have not listened to every rap song), you can base opinion on the typical features of a genre, and as uneducated as this may sound, it is the natural human reaction. Genres aside, though, we want to appeal to everyone, not just little Bobby or Miss Suzy. We have to find a way to hook in our readers, and we obviously can't just throw every little thing from every little aspect of literature in our writing, so how do we go about doing this?
It always, always, always starts with the first sentence. Humans in general have such short attention spans, that if the first sentence is not brilliant, we don't even bother with the rest of the book. Even if it's not the first thing that you think about actively, it is the first thing your subconscious picks up. Have you ever picked up a book, opened to the first page, then decided against reading the book without even reading the first sentence, for no particular reason? Most people have.
Here's some guidelines for how to avoid having a "boring" first line/paragraph/work:
- Don't bore the reader. Excessive descriptions are not necessary, we need to experience the story, but it is very important not to give the reader too much information to take in at one time.
- Don't start your post/novel/whatever with dialogue. Just don't.
- The obvious one: Space out your paragraphs. Don't have a big wall of text, and don't make the reader search for information. On Message Boards, despite grammar, it is often better to just have an empty line between your paragraphs.
- Stay on topic, but don't go for a cause --> effect set-up, unless the work you are writing is a cause --> set-up type work, IE a climatic work (we will deal with this more later, basically don't go overboard with information that is useless)
Okay, so we've got that covered, but how do we actually SET the hook? How do we actually attract the reader? The above is necessary to not have a 'bad' first line, but how do we have a 'great' first line? Good question.
Put your reader on the edge of their seat.That's what you have absolutely got to do, right from the start. The first line, and ultimately, the first paragraph have got to fulfill two very important goals to attract the reader. If you can not meet these two goals, chances are, you should start over.
1. Relate, on a subconscious level, with the reader, and connect them to your character. The first paragraph needs to give them a wonderful idea of who the character is, what his habits are, his favorite kind of food, everything. At the same time, you can't say any of that directly. You can't overload your reader.
2. Distinguish your work from other works, while at the same time making the reader reflect on what they just read, not for the sake of comprehension, but for the sake of.. well... being amazed! By that I mean, you have to make the reader think, "Wow, that's really interesting! Where is [the author] going with this?"
Let me give you the first line from a novel...
"The smell of death is always with you, like a rotten oily stain in the back of your mouth." - Joe Haldeman,
Old Twentieth.
This quote is a good example, because it leaves me, personally, thinking 'Okay, where is he going with this? Is the main character about to die? What's going on?' and yet it doesn't turn me off, it turns me on to the story.
Another idea is to start directly in the middle of the action, then die down after a few pages, then escalate the conflict to an even higher extreme. For example:
"I could feel my heart beating fast, the smell of fear in the air, and I knew in this very moment that I was dead."
Now, write an opening paragraph to, say, a novel about the captain of a spaceship leading his spaceship into war against some enemy.
