Wednesday 4 December 2013

Vicious Circle by Wilbur Smith

He came fully awake before he moved or opened his eyes.

I don't think this sentence means what I want it to mean. What follows is a herd of pronouns all for the sake of creating mystery and suspense, except it doesn't. This fog of pronouns is as annoying as beginning a movie with all the actors's faces blurred out for the same effect. That's what a pronoun does when one introduces a character with one.

Then to rub it in, paragraph two begins with a partly disguised sunrise in bed. So this opening uses a couple of cliches to stitch it together.

We at Hook My Brain had a conversation and agreed that if an opening had three cliches, it was an automatic epic fail. That includes: bed opening, car opening, weather opening, gun (especially if it's a Glock) opening, sunrise opening to name a few. Mix these cliches with pronounology, preamble, adverbs, errors and we might just have to create a new score: The Medal of Pure Stupidity: The Armageddon Zero. For such authors worthy of this honor, we might start a form just to ridicule them, hopefully to shame them into getting their lackluster lazy brains into gear and learn how to write a beginning that actually engages people intellectually, visually, imaginatively and emotionally.

So let's sum up Wilbur's opening: Bed opening? Check. Sunrise? Check? Pronounology? Check. So this one is on course for an epic fail until....

First thing said:

"Stop staring at my big fat belly and give me a kiss."

I like the first thing said. It actually conveys information in regards to plot and character rather than being a one-syllable grunt, and so it saves this from being an epic fail.

Verdict: Fail

Sincerely,
Rudy Globird

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