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The Write Stuff: In The Beginning

Monkeys? Muppets?
Maestro would seem to fit... Good article, David.
Useful advice overall & I particularly liked the part about reading the first line aloud to yourself to see if the hook felt right.
 
I agree - bloody useful, and helps focus on both the importance of getting the first line write, and how to get it right.
 
Useful advice overall & I particularly liked the part about reading the first line aloud to yourself to see if the hook felt right.

It's an old and honoured tradition. Gustave Flaubert put every line he wrote through this test. Not only of saying it aloud out but shouting it. He called it the "gueuloir", the 'bellower'. As a result, his literary style is held as one of the finest in French literature.

Mind you, he's also infamous for once rejoicing about having managed to write all of ten lines of one of his novels in a day.
 
I had forgotten it was the opening line of Six East End Boys.

Modesty?
Ah. Well caught.
That will be why I felt something a-Blaise... oh never mind.
Advising writers to be careful using pop culture references is helpful too (especially old ones, it alienates a portion of the prospective readership).
I tend to mutter them to myself, it sometimes helps with dialogue too.
 
Mind you, he's also infamous for once rejoicing about having managed to write all of ten lines of one of his novels in a day.

A feeling I'm sure all of the writers for Sealion have shared at some point.

Advising writers to be careful using pop culture references is helpful too (especially old ones, it alienates a portion of the prospective readership).

The trick to pop culture is to keep it varied, brief, and moving. Jokes about hobbiest woes can easily sit next to Melville and millitaria memetics, but the catch is that in the example the jokes are varied, buried in sound style, and acknowledged as jokes. If the audience laughs, bravo: just make sure they laugh with you and not at you.
 
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