I find this all fascinating because I am borderline obsessed with beginnings, and (in a different way) with character introductions. And it's not that I rely on them to tell me whether to keep going but that I love that process of learning the specific voice of a new author/ the particular terms of the world that I'm entering. There are lots of things I've enjoyed that I was skeptical about at first, but if a story grabs me from the very beginning, it's pretty much got me hooked.
Mid-story character entrances tend to be some of my favorites (do you feel differently about those than about beginnings, or do you also wish that they'd get on with it?) I'm talking about the part where we have already been grounded with/ gotten to know the viewpoint character and then they run into somebody new who changes the terms of the game. Maybe I patterned on The Wizard of Oz? Favorite character entrance ever, though, is Aragorn in the Fellowship movie.
Re: approaching character entrance as a writer -- in fanfic, where you assume most readers already know the characters, I always try for the character's entrance to portray them at their most essential, and for the first line they speak to sound like them, because that's the reader's signal of which Spike or Buffy or Tony or Steve they're going to get in this story, which elements of their many-faceted personalities the story is going to be about.
BTW, I never would have thought of this in relation to getting to know people in real life but it would actually be fascinating if they are related because I have a pretty hard time *remembering* people that I've met, and I usually have to be introduced once or twice before it sticks -- like, when my brother introduced me to the woman he's now married to, in the context of 'this is my new girlfriend' I basically went through all of dinner before we both established that we had in fact met before, at a group event, and were able to reconstruct conversations we'd had, but I still had no impression of meeting her before. I don't think this is a super unusual way to be -- I feel like I have similar conversations all the time re: folks who have met in casual group settings -- but for whatever reason I tend to be really conscious of it (maybe because I tend to babble to strangers a lot at social events so I'll be remeeting the person and going WHAT DO THEY ALREADY KNOW ABOUT ME?) And possibly, the level to which I am conscious of this makes me really want character introductions in my writing to stick.
For what it's worth, I like all the fist lines you list a lot. I don't think you necessarily have to be super conscious of them as a writer for them to have an impact on readers like me who are very interested in how a writer chooses to start a story.
been saving this because I wanted to think about it
Mid-story character entrances tend to be some of my favorites (do you feel differently about those than about beginnings, or do you also wish that they'd get on with it?) I'm talking about the part where we have already been grounded with/ gotten to know the viewpoint character and then they run into somebody new who changes the terms of the game. Maybe I patterned on The Wizard of Oz? Favorite character entrance ever, though, is Aragorn in the Fellowship movie.
Re: approaching character entrance as a writer -- in fanfic, where you assume most readers already know the characters, I always try for the character's entrance to portray them at their most essential, and for the first line they speak to sound like them, because that's the reader's signal of which Spike or Buffy or Tony or Steve they're going to get in this story, which elements of their many-faceted personalities the story is going to be about.
BTW, I never would have thought of this in relation to getting to know people in real life but it would actually be fascinating if they are related because I have a pretty hard time *remembering* people that I've met, and I usually have to be introduced once or twice before it sticks -- like, when my brother introduced me to the woman he's now married to, in the context of 'this is my new girlfriend' I basically went through all of dinner before we both established that we had in fact met before, at a group event, and were able to reconstruct conversations we'd had, but I still had no impression of meeting her before. I don't think this is a super unusual way to be -- I feel like I have similar conversations all the time re: folks who have met in casual group settings -- but for whatever reason I tend to be really conscious of it (maybe because I tend to babble to strangers a lot at social events so I'll be remeeting the person and going WHAT DO THEY ALREADY KNOW ABOUT ME?) And possibly, the level to which I am conscious of this makes me really want character introductions in my writing to stick.
For what it's worth, I like all the fist lines you list a lot. I don't think you necessarily have to be super conscious of them as a writer for them to have an impact on readers like me who are very interested in how a writer chooses to start a story.
/infinite babbling