Open This...

Most fiction writers have learned to write their openings so as to literally trap their readers into reading. They call it a catch. Really. As if they were snaring some animal.

I used to struggle with that one. You go through workshops and classes and they pound it into you.

I stopped, though. I don’t think of my readers that way any longer.

I write my openings as an invitation, now. Welcome to my book, my writing. Like it here? Stay a while. Don’t like it? Well, you are free to leave. You are a paid (hopefully) visitor to this hostel of words, and you may come and go as you please. Or, if you have been granted a free ride, come back again some time as a paid guest. Bring a friend with you (on their own dime, please...). Don’t like it here? There’s a nice place down the road. Just look for the flashy neon sign...

Most writers think it is all about the money. I don’t. The money will come or it won’t. That it’s about the “numbers.” I will never have Stephen King’s audience. Nor will they. I don’t need his audience. My audience will be whatever it needs to be. I don’t have the time for such fantasies. I’m too busy writing them.

I learned this lesson from a half-way decent writer. Doris Lessing. She won a Nobel Prize. In Literature. I don’t write as well as she does (I don’t write as well as any Nobel Prize winner...). But I can read (thank goodness). And she said people will read (or should) whatever they like and after a few pages just ditch it if they don't like it. Shakespeare, Melville, Homer, The Bible. Whatever. Too much to read and life is short.

Plus, there is a very old saying: de gustibus non disputandum est.

You don’t know that one? It means: “there’s no accounting for taste.” It’s so old they had to say it in a dead language.