NoWorries

How long is good? What are your favorites?

Here are two on different sides of the Spectrum:

1. Herman Melville - Call me Ishmael.
2. Ron Carlson - By his thirty-third birthday, a gray May day which found him having a warm cup of spice tea on the terrace of the Bay-side Inn in Annapolis, Maryland, with Carol Ann Menager, a nineteen-year-old woman he had hired out of the Bethesda Hilton Turntable Lounge at eleven o'clock that morning, Eddie Zanduce had killed eleven people and had that reputation, was famous for killing people, really the most famous killer of the day, his photograph in the sports section every week or so and somewhere in the article the phrase "eleven people" or "eleven fatalities"--in fact, the word eleven now had that association first, the number of the dead--and in all the major league baseball parks his full name could be heard every game day in some comment, the gist of which would be "Popcorn and beer for ten-fifty, that's bad, but just be glad Eddie Zanduce isn't here, for he'd kill you for sure," and the vendors would slide the beer across the counter and say, "Watch out for Eddie," which had come to supplant "Here you go," or "have a nice day," in conversations even away from the parks.

Creative_Insanity

Uh, first one is good.

__________________
“No.” We walked a bit in silence and then the Fool said quietly, “Fitz, home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see it what is not there anymore.”

tcaptain

I always liked "It was a dark and stormy night".

I keed, I keed.

Talia_Brie

"This is what happened."

From a Stephen King short story called "The Mist", in Skeleton Crew.

It was just brilliant, and from the moment I read it I knew I had to write a "This is what happened" story. In the end I did, called "Something is Wrong in Gatlin", and it's on my website.

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Nimbus1944

Is "It depends" an answer?

The opener should be just long enough to grab the readers. At different times, you might want to --

-- excite them (Ping!), or lull them (It was a decidedly quiet morning in Midvale, as most days were.) --

-- focus them (Silently, invisibly, U-125 slipped past Montauk into the shipping lanes.), or distract them (On the highest branches of the oak trees on Porter's Hill, the vultures sat patiently, waiting for the affairs of men to be settled in the smoke and noise below.) --

-- interest them (Did you know an early Governor of New York was a cross-dresser?), or "duh" them (The sun must rise, and sure enough, it did.).

Word count is going to vary. It doesn't matter if the reader's response is "Wow!" or "Why does this matter?", as long as they continue to read. For sure, a long, dragged-out opener can put them to sleep or send them away.

Since I'm particularly fond of JK Rowling's current stuff, allow me stats.
1st book opener: 22 words, lulling, secondary characters described.
2nd book: 17 words, focusing, says an argument is on.
3rd: 10 words, duh, our hero's a strange kid.
4th: 25, distracting, house description.
5th: 26, lulling, weather description.
Success seems to have no set pattern of opener style or length!

Excuse me now. I'm sending myself to Bulwer-Lytton.com for a much-needed refresher course.

__________________
It wouldn't be right to dream, while
Forgetting to live, it seems;
Nor would it be right to dwell on life
And yet forget our dreams.
-If There Were No Magicians

abbenormal

I like the simplicity of David Copperfield's.

"I am born."

At least I think I'm remembering it right.

Great topic by the way.....abbenormal