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Hooking the Reader: Opening Lines that Sell by Sharon Rendell-Smock Morris Publishing, July, 2001. Paperback, 215 pages. ISBN: 0965498123 Ordering information: Amazon.com 
Beginning writers are often told to open with a bang. But how
do you come up with that killer opening line?
This writing book focuses on creating
effective openings. The book contains advice
from hundreds of authors, as well as
the opening sentences from their books.
Some of the authors featured include
Anne McCaffrey, Stuart Woods,
Michael Connelly, Poul
Anderson, Dana Stabenow and
Larry Niven.
The book also includes "Off the
Shelf" sections, which contains
lists of good openings to books.
Some example openings are
"I felt compelled to report that at the
moment of my death, my entire life
did not pass before my eyes in a flash,"
from Sue Grafton's I is for Innocent;
"For more than two hundred years,
the Owens women have been blamed
for everything that has gone wrong in
town," from Alice Hoffman's Practical
Magic; "Nobody thinks about death
on a nice spring day," from Ed McBain's
Ten Plus One; and "The world had teeth and it could
bite you with them anytime it wanted,"
from Stephen King's The Girl Who
Loved Tom Gordon.
The most interesting part about the
book is what each author has to say,
which is often enlightening and
entertaining.
Hooking the Reader is an interesting and useful
book for writers needing assistance
with writing openings or just
curious about how other authors create
openings to their bestsellers.
Reprinted with permission from The Internet Writing Journal®. Copyright © 1997-2011 by Writers Write, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
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Copyright © 1997-2011 by Writers Write, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
www.readersread.com
