First Sentences

[rowyn]

A week or two ago, I read a comment suggesting that the people who go through the slush pile of story submissions often only read the first sentence of each submisssion. If you don't grab them in the first sentence, that's it.

So, I was trying to think of opening sentences that would "grab" a reader right from the start. I came up with a bunch, and mixed in some from stories I've already written. (No telling people if you recognize an opener, now!) :)

I decided to make a poll of it (what the heck, I've had a paid account for over a year and I've never yet used this "poll" feature). So, here's my question:

Pretend you're an editor for a magazine that publishes fantasy & science fiction short stories. You're going through a stack of 300 submissions, of which you need to publish maybe one or two. Which, if any, of the following would you be likely to read more of, based solely on the first sentence? Assume you know nothing whatsoever about the author; all you're going to make your decision on is this first sentence. (You do know that the length of the story falls within your publication's guidelines.)

EDIT: A few people have pointed out obvious spelling errors in these. O.O;;; I can't edit the poll itself, but please, for the purpose of this exercise, pretend that I ran these through a spell-checker. (What's really embarrassing is that I think one of these was actually submitted to a publication with an obvious spelling error in the first sentence. Argh!)

I've set this up on a scale of 1-10, with "1" as the "definitely would read". Please don't rank more than one of the options with a "1" And honesty will be appreciated more than cheering, just this once. :)

[Poll #190802]

I figure, whichever one is the most popular, I'll try to craft a story around. :) I hope this poll code works. :)

[EDITED 3:57PM: addressed a couple of questions Level_Head had about the poll.]

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

An editor in what genré?

Fantasy? Science fiction? Fiction? Mystery?

And format: are these intended to be for novels or short stories?

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

Er ... guess I should've been more specific. An editor for a magazine that publishes both fantasy and science fiction short stories, but not straight fiction/mysteries/romances etc. These are short stories; please assume that the length of the whole story falls within the publication's guidelines.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Is it all right for me to post my whys and wherefores on my responses? Or would it be best for me to just wait until you close the poll?

[rowyn]

You could email them to me! :) Or you could wait a couple days and post 'em here. But I'd be delighted to hear your reasons. :)

[krud42.livejournal.com]

I may have skewed the results by my voting method; I ranked them 1-10, in the order that I liked them (so I gave one a 1, one a 2, one a 3, etc...)

There were two that I would have given 1's, however. (And a few that I would have given 2's.)

[rowyn]

Actually, I like that you ranked 'em 1-10. If I could've gotten the poll to make it easy for people to rank them from "best" to "worst" I would've. However, while I could give options of picking 1-12, it'd involve a drop-box that would default to "1", which I thought would be more annoying to use. Plus, it could skew the results high, since people who got bored half-way through would default to picking "1" for the ones they ignored. And even so, it wasn't going to track for you if you'd already picked an "8" or whatever. I figured it'd be too annoying to fill out if I encouraged people to do it that way.

But I'm happy that you decided to do it that way, any how. Yay! More input! :)

[detroitfather.livejournal.com]

Darn it!

I've screwed up your poll. I did not read the Instructions carefully enough, so in my answers 1=bad, 10=best! Oh, no ...
can you delete my answers so that it doesn't mess up your statistics?

Or (LOL) perhaps my opinion is faulty enough that its inverse is trustworthy!?

[rowyn]

Tuftears did the same thing. (And I wouldn't be surprised is one or two others did, too.)

If you click on the poll link in the post above, and then click on "fill out poll", you can re-enter your answers. (I can't invert them or clear them for you, alas. Not without your account password, anyway. :D )

Thank you for participating in it, and for letting me know about the misunderstanding. :)

[detroitfather.livejournal.com]

Okay, I fixed up my poll answers.

[rowyn]

Thanks!