Friday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts

GRAB THE READER WITH YOUR OPENING LINES

By: Darcy Pattison

Openings are incredibly important. This was brought back to me recently as I was judging a contest. Those manuscripts that kept my interest for three pages were rare. Usually, they lost me by the middle of page two!

Am I harsh? I don’t think so.

Noah Lukeman has it right in his book, The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. This is a book I ask those attending my Novel Revision retreats to read before they attend. Lukeman’s premise is that an editor will decide if they want your book or not based on the first five pages of your manuscript. After judging this contest, I agree. Sometimes, you can even make a judgment based on the first paragraph.

That first paragraph? You want to grab the reader by the throat and never let go!

Here are five things that made me stop reading:

. . .

Read the full article HERE! 

~*~

If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:

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11. KCross Writing – The Making of a Novel: Behind the Scenes with Antebellum Awakening http://ow.ly/HKGkv
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18. On Art and Life | Dani Shapiro http://ow.ly/HKQXQ "Let’s move on to the what ifs.  These are the biggies, of course." 
19. How to know when you're done writing your novel? http://ow.ly/HL2I3
20. Openings: 5 Ways They Go Wrong http://ow.ly/HLgi4
21. Scenes: The Skeleton of a Novel | Fiction Notes http://ow.ly/HLgDJ

Happy writing and running, Kathy