First Sentence of Novel

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spotted_leaf

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There was a serpent emerging from the remnants of the belfry of the tall brown building, half adumbrated by the shifting shadows of the cool desert twilight. It slithered insidiously along, its whip of a tongue lolling from side to side, its body careening in perfect cadence with its treacherous head.
Those are the first two sentences of my novel.
Does anyone have any feedback?
regarding tone? mood?
If it is an interesting at all capturing beginning?
 
I don't know if I'd use the word "adumbrated" because until this moment, I'd never heard it before. It is a novel, so you're allowed some leeway in your description. But this feels a little drawn out to me. Just an opinion though. Overall, not bad.
 
In my opinion I think it is a little saturated with the big words. I kind of feel like you might be choking it a little bit with all the explicit descriptions, which leads to a dragging feeling and somehting I think the average human of this day will put down because they don't understand half of the words being used. A good word here or there is fantastic but when they start to show up in gangs, I get worried. I, personally, like descriptive sentences, but I think you may end up boring a large portion of your audience.

Also, on a small note, I think I would use "a" instead of "the" when discussing the large brown building. "The" is typically used to imply that the reader already knows about the object, but since this is the first sentence it is also the first time they have heard about the building, thus you should use "a" to introduce it.

Some examples: I used "the" to talk about the building above because we already know about it. You are only supposed to use "the" if it is something most people would already know about or have already seen in the pervious text of the book. You could say "the bark on the tree" because we all know there is bark on a tree, not all of us know that there is a tall brown building in your story.

That is just a major nitpick. Please don't think I am being to harsh or saying your stuff is crap, because it is not. It was very well done I am just trying to help you out.

Best of luck! :beer: I tried writing a book a few times, it is no easy task. I have put them away for now while I work on screen writing.
 
Yeah, novels are so hard. It takes me long enough to rewrite a 120 page screenplay. A 400 page novel?? fuggetaboutit
 
cut the fancy words - do you really think even 1% of readers know what 'adumbrated' means?
 
My nitpick involves the tense -- why past tense and not present? For instance, "A serpent emerges from the remnants of the belfry of the tall brown building..." Or at the very least, "A serpent emerged from the remnants of the belfry of the tall brown building...", which would keep it in past tense, but in a less passive way.

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whoa. the adjectives are supernumerary. it's like a googolplex (10^10^100) of adjectives.

the mood i get is stygian, kinda menacing, and definitely paced about the same as that snake. I am interested in what happens next, though, as it may be the superfluous introduction of a similarly sordid situation. kinda reads like salman rushdie, who i think is a great storyteller, but a very magniloquent writer.

oh, and i think your use of 'the' for 'the...building' is fine if you plan to return to this building later on in the plot (or earlier on in the story).

just my .02
 
You know I didn't know where that line "the dingo ate my baby" was from for about 20 years. and then one day I saw the movie on cable. It was an epiphany of sorts. and now I can look at things like your screen name and say, "I know what that means".
 
I would tend to agree with the previous posts. The description might need to be a little more accessible - it should help create a visual impression rather than confound the reader. In terms of tone, I would suggest that your actual word choice may be harming instead of helping. Using "whip" and "lolling" in the same sentence to impart the description of its tongue or "perfect cadence", (which sounds controlled), together with "careening" are examples of language that fights with itself to describe the action - this effects the overall tone immensely.

Maybe something like...

The great serpent shifts. Uncoiling its thick ropey mass, it slithers slowly from the dusty remnants of a dilapidated brownstone. Its oily black tongue flicks, tasting the cool night air. The unblinking, foggy eyes seem dead inside its most treacherous head.


Just a thought...



dmc
 
spotted_leaf said:
There was a serpent emerging from the remnants of the belfry of the tall brown building, half adumbrated by the shifting shadows of the cool desert twilight. It slithered insidiously along, its whip of a tongue lolling from side to side, its body careening in perfect cadence with its treacherous head.
Those are the first two sentences of my novel.
Does anyone have any feedback?
regarding tone? mood?
If it is an interesting at all capturing beginning?
Click to expand...

Avoid "to be verbs" and stringing prepositions together.

Rather than "was emerging" try "emerged". To be verbs weaken sentences, and add unnecessary words. You don't have to tell us there was a thing doing something, tell us the thin did it.

And you have three prepositional phrases strung together, "from the remnants" "of the belfry" "of the tall brown building" this makes your sentence read like a list with complicated movement, of, over, around, under, out, gives the feeling that the sentence will go on and on adding something in something in something rather than driving towards a single point or image.


The serpent emerged from the belfry ruins ...

As for tall brown building, not very evocative - tall and brown - is it necessary?

A belfry is a tower, sometimes the connotation is the bit at the top. Snakes go on the ground. Where is this snake? The base of the belfry tower, or slithering down the tower from the top?

Does "shifting shadows of the cool desert twilight" work? Twilight has no shadow. It casts shadows, i.e., "shadows of" makes sense when you say "the shifting shadows of passersby" or "shifting shadows of ruins in the cool desert twilight" .... "shifting shadows in the cool desert twilight" makes sense.
 
I think one of the most important things for the opening of any novel, no matter the mood, is a sense of urgency. If you can get the reader interested in the results of an action with-in the first sentence, then you have an opening that will make people continue reading.

When I'm deciding whether or not to read a book, I read the back, and the first sentence. If both aren't interesting to me, I put it down.

Not only do the first sentences have to be well written, they also have to be interesting. There has to be plot with-in the first sentence, and you have to have a cliff hanger. It seems very difficult to do, but it's worth it to get perfect.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the writing, I actually think it's quite good, but I would not read a book with that first sentence, because there's nothing happening in it.
 
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