How important is it to you, as a reader, to see a first sentence or short paragraph which immediately grabs your attention and coaxes you to continue reading the entire rest of the story?
I enjoy an imaginative hook/lure, myself. I can't always fit one in, when I write, however.
The same GQP demanding we move on from January 6th, 2021 is still doing audits of the November 3rd, 2020 election.
Generally I need to be hooked on the first paragraph.
It gives me a flavour for the style of story and the writer's skill level. If it's a good appetizer, then I will want to move on to the main course.
If it doesn't capture my interest, or if it's not well executed in terms of quality of writing then I typically bypass the rest of the story.
I think that the first page of a book, has to seduce me to reading more. The author will have wrote in an emotional way for me, and the way the words have been placed with have a great impact on whether I want to continue reading; also a good visual image on the first page grips my attention.2cXBPHPBT5UIZ9h6
If it's a short story, the first couple of paragraphs has to draw me in for me to keep reading.
If it's a book, I'll keep reading regardless, hoping it gets better as it goes along.
It's a very important skill for writers. Readers are easily bored. You need to grab their attention and hold it. By the end of the second paragraph, they need to either become excited by the action occurring, connect with a main character, or emotionally invested in something that story is presenting... if not... a lot of people won't read much farther.
At the end of the first chapter, there needs to be a desire to turn the page and begin the next. A fair amount of people will finish a book they start, if they bought it. If they borrowed it or checked it out of the library... they might not, if the story doesn't hold their interest. But if they do finish, but weren't thrilled, you can be sure they won't return to buy more from that author. So there needs to be a baited ending too. Not a cliff hanger... no no no, those are hated by a lot of readers. But your ending needs to be a clean break, leaving the reader at the pinnacle of their love for the story and the characters, yet climatically so (don't leave anything unresolved, unless its part of a series)... so those feelings last awhile in the readers memory. Make sense?
The tagline gets my curiosity, and then the first few paragraphs will tell me if I should read the rest of the story or not.
I look for and am grateful for the 'hook'. It particularly helps me when sifting through the myriad of submissions here on Lush. Once hooked I tend to follow Gypsy's methodology.
I tried sifting by category but have found many authors write tales that straddle categories.
"Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English." - Korben Dallas, from The Fifth Element
"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience?" - George Bernard Shaw
I like to get a flavor of the story line pretty quickly, not necessarily in first few lines but soon enough.. when I write though I like to imply a story line but give a twist to the ending.. it's not always what you see..
If the first paragraph hasn't got me in, chances are i'll just look for something else. The way i see it is that the first part is written when the author has that spark of inspiration and if they can't convey that down onto the page, well, the rest isn't worth reading, no matter how good the plot is. Plenty of people have good ideas, but not everyone can make them look good.
The one thing that will really put me off is what I call the pathologist's report. You know:
She was 5'6" tall, 256 lbs, 48-18-44 with size 5 shoes and dirty blonde hair that was plaited into her pubes, which were jet black.
If it was the first sentence or even the first paragraph of most stories an author depended on to hook his or her reader into having a story read Stephen King would probably be unknown and dirt poor.
