Finally got started. Took out my spade and broke the ground. I've done about half of the first chapter so far. I don't know if this will pass Hal Duncan's first sentence critique test, but here's the first paragraph:
Dee, Mathematician, Magus, Spy, picks up the cards that he has been dealt. The good quality deck is of the Italian style. He has one card with seven gold coins, made with real gold leaf. The other depicts seven batons, sprouting leaves. “Numerus quarante huit,” he says, making his bid. He hasn’t been recognised yet, good. He places a few coins on the table in front of him and observes the reaction.
16th Century pulp, historical accuracy and adventure. Why did I do this to myself?
2 comments:
Let's see... ;)
The gratuitous capitalisation of "mathematician", "magus" and "spy" (in order to make Dee sound Important, no?) risks taking the focus away from the subject of the sentence -- Dee -- by raising these terms to equal (i.e. capitalised) standing with the proper name. As your eye hits the page you see:
D~~, M~~~~~~~~~~~, M~~~~, S~~
Which strikes me as signaling a list of four Things, rather than one Thing (Dee) with three attributes. Visually it's a bit jarring, though the actual words fit together into a perfectly good opening line. I'd suggest taking out the capitals and using dashes to segregate out the description, which is basically parenthetical to the sentence:
Dee -- mathematician, magus, spy -- picks up the cards that he has been dealt.
Seems to me, that's how the line is meant to be read. If you were reading it aloud it would be sorta: "Dee", pause, "mathematician, magus, spy", pause, "picks up the cards..." and so on. I like that sense of a pause in the sentence, a brief diversion from the main thrust of it in order to give Dee his attributes; it plays to the suspense of the poker game, the sort of dramatic pauses you might add before a player turns their cards over and reveals... my God... a full house. Does that make sense?
(Oh, and I'd also put a semi-colon before "good" in the second last sentence, rather than a comma.)
Anyhoo... I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But how could I resist the invocation? In all seriousness, I think it's a perfectly good opening line, and a very good opening paragraph all in. Introduces Dee with big juicy dollops of mystery (Tarot) and suspense (Poker) that hook the reader well and good. I'm just being a nit-picky bastard about the grammar cause, well, I couldn't resist the challenge. My rationale for opening line crits is that it's the first thing that hits an editor's eye, so it's the first "make or break" point, where they decide to either read on for the first X pages, or to toss the manuscript immediately. For all my bastardy nit-picking I think you've got a good enough hook that they'd read on. They might have a "hmmm, if you just did this here... if you added that there" editorial reaction about how the prose could be tweaked and teased (assuming they're style junkies like me), but there's none of the sorta major problems that would make them stop reading, which is what my "first sentence critique test" is really about.
So basically, to my mind, you pass, though I think with a few twiddles in the text you could gain extra credit. :)
Cheers Al, oddly that had kinda occured to me during the revision.
See folks, you have to be careful what you invoke. I always stand by Lovecrafts approach in one of his stories 'Don't raise up that which you can't out back down' ;-)
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