![]() ![]() Nobody's riding on the hay truck because they bought a ticket. This sentence tells you more than you think it tells you. But Cain pulls off so much more than a loaded setting - and the best writers do. Suddenly, you're right inside the story - the speaker takes a lift on a hay truck and gets found out. They threw me off the hay truck about noon. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice certainly plunges you into a specific time and place, just as something is happening: This is what we call a "hook," and it's true, to a point. We've all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation, because right away you engage the reader's interest. How can a writer extend an appealing invitation - one that's difficult, even, to refuse? An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.īut there's one thing I'm sure about. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft - I just write. Stephen King: There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. ![]() Stephen King spoke to me by phone from his home in Maine. Cain, looked back on favorite intros he's written, and explained how he approaches a book's first moments. King paid tribute to Douglas Fairbairn and James M. So, he analyzed both his choices as part of a broader discussion about opening lines - a topic not addressed at length in his memoir-as-craft-manual, On Writing. When I asked him to share a favorite passage for this series, King couldn't choose between two favorites both, we noticed, were first sentences. "Well, that's because you read the first one when you were 13 fuckin' years old, hiding under the covers with a flashlight!" The first one really scared me," he said. "I can hear everyone saying, 'That wasn't so scary. That book's pre-Kubrick readers are 35 years older now. "It's a good book, a scary book, but I wonder if some people won't like it as much as the original," King told me. On his website, the author calls it a "return to balls-to-the-wall, keep-the-lights-on horror." This long-awaited sequel to 1977's The Shining revisits traumatized child psychic Danny Torrance - he goes by Dan, now - all grown up and still struggling to understand his frightening gift. King's second book, Doctor Sleep, which will be published in September by Scribner, is everything Joyland isn't. In The New York Times, Walter Kirn aptly compared the book to a fair ride - it's brief, thrilling, and sweetly quaint. Though Joyland's story is haunted by a terrifying killer of young women, the book mostly chronicles the yearning rhythms of one adolescent summer - carny talk and plushie toys, boardwalks and broken hearts. In June, Joyland was published by Hard Case Crime, an imprint showcasing classic and contemporary crime writers in paperback editions dressed up like vintage pulps: Stylized covers feature ominous taglines, brooding private dicks, and draped-out femme fatales. Stephen King brings us two new novels in 2013 - one on shelves already, and the other forthcoming. ![]()
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