Difficult doesn’t make it good

by Guy Bergstrom

While in the Belgium, home of the world’s finest chocolate and 250 types of beer – 250! – I saw something that made me think.

No, it was not the beer. Though the beer was excellent.

This is what made me think: a concert on BBC or PBS or whatever with a violinist doing an insanely difficult piece.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCLxso5XDN4]

Now, that wasn’t the exact piece. This YouTube video is something close, though it’s far less technically difficult and far more enjoyable. You should’ve heard the crazy thing, and seen her beat that violin like a dirty rug.

Was her technical skill amazing?

Oh yes.

Did she make faces like she was passing a kidney stone?

You have no idea.

Did the music move me at all?

Not one bit. Hated it.

The forest for the trees

Here’s the thing: creative people tend to focus on developing the most difficult technical skills WHILE IGNORING THE BIG STUFF.

  • Journalists learn all about headline counts and press law, but nobody questions whether the inverted pyramid is the right structure for the next 12,023 stories they’ll write.
  • Writers spend months or years cranking on novels, but if you put a 9 mm to their head and counted down from five, they couldn’t boil that novel down into four-word pitch – or logline, tagline or headline.
  • Figure skaters put all this time and effort into triple-axles and whatnot, despite the fact that only professional skaters and judges can tell the difference between a triple toe loop and a triple lux-whatever. The only thing we average people know is  (a) whether the skating is fun to watch and (b) how many times they fall down. Also, (c) how you can consider this a sport when the winner is determined by faceless judges, not who runs the fastest or scores the most points?

Now, I’m not saying that you should ignore your technical skills, whether you’re trying to break into Hollywood with your zombie high school musical or become the next Johnny Rotten.

The point is, technical skills come into play late in the game. Without working on the stuff that nobody teaches you – the short, pithy, publicity side – nobody will see your amazing technical wizardry with words, film or electric guitars hooked to amplifiers that go up to eleven.

Here’s little kids playing Metallica, with far less technical skill. (Metallica is secretly easy to play.) Yet I enjoyed the heck out of this and would happily listen to it again, while you would have to deliver suitcases stuffed with purple euros to get me to listen to the violin craziness again.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu716a-J2gQ]

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Guy Bergstrom won awards as a journalist before working as a speechwriter and cashing checks from The New York Times as about.com’s expert on public relations. He wrote a thriller (FREEDOM, ALASKA) that won some award and he’s represented by Jill Marr of the Dijkstra Literary Agency. Follow him on his blog redpenofdoom.com, or Twitter at @speechwriterguy, or Google+

The first sentence is a promise

The first sentence of a book is like the air between mouths just before a first kiss. It’s a promise.

It fills you up, yet makes you want more. It’s the precise combination of slight humidity and warmth that takes your hand and invites you in for tea.

Readers open your book, glance at page one and decide if they want to read more. So how do you make them say yes?

The goal of that first sentence is not to entice someone to read your entire book. It’s to get them curious enough to read the next sentence. And the second sentence should make them want to read the third. The third should lead them to the fourth. (You get the idea.)

Some of the best first lines ever written do exactly that.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. – —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

The only thing particularly interesting about a first sentence is that it has the distinction of being first. So, yeah, it’s important in that it should bring intrigue. But don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Just write it so your reader wants to know what happens next. (Because why read on if the sentence goes nowhere?)

Make it interesting. Lure your reader to ogle the sentence being pulled behind the first. Spill details so that your reader starts asking questions. Make her wonder what happens next. And then tell her.

Withholding information is the single biggest mistake most writers make. It leaves the reader confused and aggravated – and then she stops reading. Give her the information, gently, in bite-size chunks. Never all at once.

The best books make us feel as though we’re walking into a story already underway. In just a few lines, we understand these characters have a believable, tangible past and we are now catching up to what will be the most interesting part of their lives.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. – Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye 

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Keep it simple. But make us want more.

What are some of your favorite first lines? Leave ’em in the comments.

P.S. Since this post went out (about 15 minutes ago), my email has blown up with first lines from YOUR work. If you want me to take a look – and I am happy to – leave those in the comments as well. We can learn from each other.

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