Watch out for that hook-wielding writer! · 5:18pm Oct 28th, 2016
I don’t have any new stories for halloween, alas. The best I can do is wave a few sharp hooks in your general direction:
Scootaloo had always wondered how many fireworks could fit in her wagon.
Angry hoof steps next door. The tension makes me giddy. Dinner’s ready.
--Of Flies and Spiders by wYvern
"So." Ahuizotl's grin split his face like a machete slash across a watermelon.
Scansion awoke to the unpardonable sin of having ended a line of iambic pentameter seven syllables short.
The battered sign calls this a park, but there’s little here beyond rusting fences, weeds growing up through cracks in the concrete, and a scattering of naked basketball hoops.
Finally, after forty long minutes of struggle and hardship, of sweat and tears and at least one sunburn, Dinky Hooves had taken her rightful place as Queen of the Universe.
--Dinky vs. the Moon by Dubs Rewatcher
Lyra would always remember being born: gravity pinning her to the hard kitchen floor, acrid smells from spent spell ingredients burning her eyes, and chilly midnight air sapping heat away from her damp coat.
Heh, very nice. Chris from OneMansPonyRamblings has been doing First Sentences in Fanfiction for a while, and they always tickle me (even though I haven't made the list yet). I would be remiss if I did not mention this one:
Martial Bliss, by Skywriter (story: 4 stars)
The first line: "All right, maggot!" bellowed Staff Sergeant Thunderous, once of the Equestrian Royal Guard. "Today's the day we teach you to use the most deadly weapon in the Palace Arsenal!"
It gained an entry in Horizon's Never The Final Word series from PoweredByTea, and a wonderful comment by GhostOfHeraclitus:
Thou Goddess is literally one of the greatest works on this site.
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Chris and his blog are nigh-indispensable. My modest hook collection here is just a cheap (Halloween) trick
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All of these sound like good writing, but to me, a really hooky first line in isolation should have a sort of dissonance to it: two things jammed together in a way that doesn't quite make sense, which invites exploration into why things are that way. On that metric, the first ones I'd read here would be Flies and Spiders (why is anger making the narrator giddy?) and Cleave (how is Lyra remembering her birth?). Hook achieved.
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pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw1306_small.jpg
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That formula definitely makes for a good hook. The others work for me because they set a tone that makes me want to read just a little more to see if that tone holds (or if I'm about to be surprised in a good way).
Big Trouble: ooo, CMC and explosions!
Collaborators: uh oh, Daring Do must be in up to her neck now
Your formula might've held true for more of them if I'd included a few hundred words from each story instead of a sentence or two.
Oddly enough, I still think this is one of the weakest hooks I've written. Funny, yea, but I know for a fact a bunch of my other stories have better hooks. Still glad you thought this one was worth mentioning!
4276362 Those kinds of discordant openings do add interest, but (as I'd note your own story in this list doesn't have that kind of opener), I'm just as taken in by a lovely use of language or an immediately immersive mood. If in one not overly long sentence, the author can paint a vivid and original scene, I'm sticking around for more.
The one Blazzing was originally going to use is more the type you speak of, from "Spring Cleaning":
And I'd add that in the format we have here, it's far more likely the reader gets taken in by the synopsis, since he has to open the story to see the first line (unless they happen to be the same). Printed fiction still has the blurbs, but they're a bit different, and a reader is probably more likely to give the first page a look for that than he would here. It's kind of a curious effect I hadn't considered before.