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Opening Lines in Your Story

Kanata.EXE

Programmer
Author
This is a thread to discuss and give criticism about the opening lines in your story whether it's a novel, a web serial, or a quest.

Opening lines are like a hook. If the opening is bad, nobody will be interested to read your story. Thus, to make people continue reading it, you need to make a good hook.

That's why I create this thread. To help people to make a good opening.

Now that's out of the way, let's start with me. I have this story that I need to write.

=====

A war raged beneath the scorched and burning sky. The ravaged wasteland littered with smashed and burning wrecks of armored steel giants. But even now, the two armies still continued their war.

Two companies of battered titans faced each other, their vast strides shaking the landscape as each sought advantage, their weapons clashed with each other and ready to capitalize the first sign of weakness. These were Strike Gears; the latest faces of war.


=====

This one is actually a new version after I got the criticism on SV. The original lines were like this:
From the orange sky of a wasteland, there was a war between two opposing armies. The roar of war could be heard far away as the sun bathed upon them. Both sides were equal in terms of power and size.

But something was off with this battle. Each of their footsteps shook the ground and emitted a loud thud. Each of their clashes blew away the winds hard. Normal people shouldn't be able to do that.

The answer lied in the fighters themselves. They were not all humans. Rather, they were massive steel giants. These giants were called Strike Gears or SG for short.

What do you guys think?
 
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This is a thread to discuss and give criticism about the opening lines in your story whether it's a novel, a web serial, or a quest.

Opening lines are like a hook. If the opening is bad, nobody will be interested to read your story. Thus, to make people continue reading it, you need to make a good hook.

That's why I create this thread. To help people to make a good opening.

Now that's out of the way, let's start with me. I have this story that I need to write.

=====

A war raged beneath the scorched and burning sky. The ravaged wasteland littered with smashed and burning wrecks of armored steel giants. But even now, the two armies still continued their war.

Two companies of battered titans faced each other, their vast strides shaking the landscape as each sought advantage, their weapons clashed with each other and ready to capitalize the first sign of weakness. These were Strike Gears; the latest faces of war.


=====

This one is actually a new version after I got the criticism on SV. The original lines were like this:
From the orange sky of a wasteland, there was a war between two opposing armies. The roar of war could be heard far away as the sun bathed upon them. Both sides were equal in terms of power and size.

But something was off with this battle. Each of their footsteps shook the ground and emitted a loud thud. Each of their clashes blew away the winds hard. Normal people shouldn't be able to do that.

The answer lied in the fighters themselves. They were not all humans. Rather, they were massive steel giants. These giants were called Strike Gears or SG for short.

What do you guys think?

The best opening lines are simple, and don't force feed the reader a lot of complex stuff all at once. Readers are there for escapism and don't want to learn a foreign language or have to memorize some fictional space opera TO&E all at once.

"Call me Ishmael." Opening line to Moby Dick or The Whale, by Herman Melville.

That has a hook, an implied question of who he really is that you are at least mildly curious to know. Few people won't read on to at least the next line, and he continues with such simple intriguing descriptions to grow a perfect word picture that draws you in to someone else's world, a world completely different than your own, but one that you could see yourself in.

Those opening lines were just some stuff about giant impractical Japanese robots fighting over who cares? How does the reader relate? That's a channel changer right there. If there was a guy there, looking up at that shit you could open it with something like this.

Fuck Mondays.

We all relate to that.
 
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Personally a huge fan of in media res. It is such a great way to start a story by establishing the characters, the setting, the tone, and even the conflict when done properly.
 
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