Update

172 Hits

$6,666


666, see what they say about Keegan is true...

More Competition Prizes

After thirteen hits posted yesterday, more good news!!


Joel wins $100 Third Place at WriteSpace

Cally gets $30 as a runner-up

Chrissie places a story at Doodledog

Which Takes Us To...

169 Hits

$6,536

13 Boot Camp Hits: $322

1 Jason picks up Third Place ($200) ad in the H E Bates Short-Story Competition (Print)

2 Joel gets Highly recommended in the H E Bates Short-Story Comp, also (Print)

3 Jason Jackson was shortlisted at Guildford

4 TomC is accepted for "Chaos Theory" ($10)

5 Cally earns $50 and a nice Oz publication in "Etchings" (Print)

6 Rupert gets into Diddledog

7 Christina has a flash accepted for Smokebox

8 Louise Cypher gets $20 and a pub in "Murky Depths" print mag

9 Jason Jackson earns $30 with a story at Espresso Fiction

10 Matt gets a story into January's "Transmission" (Print)

11 Tom gets a story into "Fly in Amber" ($10)

12 Tom has a story in "Balderdash" and earns a whole $2

13 Rupert has a story accepted for print-mag "Four Volts"

11 Joel gets highly recommended at JBWB

Saturday 04:00 Prompts

A beautiful building, an ugly one
A billion, more or less
A brave and rare man, Hungarian
A furious woman
A garden, a slum
A soldier boy, dark, and tall. He is marked with a target
Blodwen is pregnant
Does that explain it?
Double your money
Dreams must remain damp to lessen shrinkage
Driving West through Wales
Everyone prefers good looks to ugliness
Has anyone seen my sky?
He spent seven years in solitary, dreaming of fires
I am considering eating your budgie
I bitterly resented the way men grabbed me
I can, thenk God, walk forever
I cannot run more than a few yards
I have what every poet hates
I ought to be happy
I place my hope upon the water. It sinks
I think I had no self-consciousness
I took my looks for granted
Irish carpentry, American kindness
Lamplight, yellow windows, light bleeding
Love is liquid
May I borrow your gun? I have my own bullets
My body is wearing out
My friends started dying when I was quite young.
My immortal soul
Neither here nor there, and almost arriving
Now it strikes me as a huge joke
Outside yellow corn, yellow, yellow, yellow
Popcorn
Somehow made tolerable
Something is broken
Stone, harsh wind
The body, face, brain are all oneself
The dogs will stop me writing
The meteor is coming. It fills the sky
The street was lined with fish
The wife is twenty years younger
The world is emptier
War and the pity of war
What the hell did they mean wanting my body?
Whenever I phone, the answers come first
Where can I go to escape the smell?
Will there also be singing?
You decided to come in the back way
You know the people there.
You think of looks always in relation to sex. I don't.
You went out to buy cigarettes. I killed myself quickly then hid
You will know who they are by their absence
You wrote that a friend had died

Thursday prompts

This version of the story is in English. In Milan.

Sadness, that's normal, it goes with the territory.

Squinting against the late-afternoon sun as it cut through the birch trees
In the afternoons before the holidays Trish had started frequenting a restaurant a few blocks west of the apartment.

I loved a girl once. Every story starts that way, right?

There she goes. Who? That girl. What girl? You know. What's-her-name.

Florence Melnick went to the library every day.

They're married, but not to each other.

On the way home from hospital, Ava tells Charlotte that after her first husband was killed during a German air attack on Bari in 1943, she cried without pause for weeks, only to emerge from her stunning grief temporarily blind.

Once upon a time two men lived down the bottom of a nuclear missile silo.

Years before my sister Allie became the champion you know and love – winner of the International Matzo-Eating Contest, title-holder of the Conch Fritter Invitational, the girl who down nine sticks of butter in five minutes – she binged her way through a dinner dare that became her finest hour (and my longest).

Dolly's first big idea was the hat.

When I started out volunteering on Monday nights at New Day House, it was just me, Karen, and a rotating cast of eight or ten kids who, with their sticky marker-covered hands and mysteriously damp clothes, would greet us by lunging into our arms and leading us into the basement playroom.

From Wanda Farrelly-Johnson. Are we God's Children of Ham? And other Dilemmas of Black Historical Research (Pilot, N.C.: Lizard Ladies Press, 1983):

Tommy's cousin Gabe. Tommy's distant cousin Gabe from Stillwater, Minnesota. Tommy's cousin Gabe, related to my husband through divorce and remarriage, in lieu of actual blood, who arrives on my front porch at dinnertime with a duffel bag and fanny-pack. Industrial-sized.

Dear Doctor X, if I may call you that. Perhaps I should introduce myself.

I met Adam at the bookstore. He was in the section marked Biography/History.

You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun, your uncles and aunts thought so too.

New AK Article

http://www.internetwritingjournal.com/articles/shoot_the_rhino.htm

Story Prompts & a Reminder

These daily prompts appear on the bootcampkeegandiaries (lik on the right) and only occasionally here



PROMPTS

A blessing be upon your house

TUBE

A nasty break – my son's – and needing pins

HOMESTEAD

a little gas and air, barbiturates, routine

MAJESTY

quietly close your eyes.

HOW NOT TO BELIEV

The trolley trundles; I pretend

JACOB's LADDER

his hand, mine, confederate, serene

THE RED TELEPHONE

they shroud his eye, his light put out

BLACKER

with sticky juices, half a death, he waits

HELEN OF TRING

through flapping doors to mystery

DELUSION

and all around is cancer, hideous disease

MAO'S LITTLE BOOK OF RECIPES

I did not taste what went into my mouth,

MICROSCOPE, GLASS

"What do YOU want, mother?"

THE COMPLETE SHIRT NOVELS OF SIMON BAREBACK

I am my ownworse nightmare, idiot,

TOWER

I saw his face, I loved it, him

A FIVE-WHEELED CYCLE

I was there in linen, lying, saw

MERRY, MARY, MAYBE

the drugs were cutting in, the pain subsiding, a

BLAST

Once on a moonlight road

PLATE

the deer was broken backed, eyes bulged.

THE RED CHICKEN, THE BLACK

under moon, we went three separate ways

Prompts & a Reminder

These were the story prompts for Saturday 31st, but see below, they are also poetry prompts

PLEASE NOTE that the bootcampkeegandiaries (see link on right) is where BC members post their ongoing Boot Camp experiences andwhere we are also posting prompts, hits etc.



As a lot of today's story-prompts are lines from poems, they are today's poetry prompts too.

try TWO poems, one inspired by, another using (some) actual lines and combining to create new meanings

There is a whole RAFT of good poetry comps this month so GET WRITING







Time wasted and time spent, daytime with used up wit.

PYRAMID

Will you take a seat? The war will soon be over.

RAZOR, LIGHT

I read of a thousand killed.

My Grandfather's Skull

Thick wool is muslin tonight and the wire scorches stone-cold shoulder

PEAS

in the red darkness, through the filtered light

ACID, SMILE, ALKALI, GRIN

There is a SUPREME BEING (in the ethnological section)...

Why Tuesdays are Different

COO-POO

Wher pink thighs flash like the spokes of a wheel

Melt My Medals, Build Something

I offer you my forests and my street cries

DORIAN GRAY

The man who sold aircraft carriers

The Elecdtronic Nature of Desire

our mother is in the night, into the day we flow

Romeo, Romeo, ar you coming or not fer fuck's sake!

in the stump of the ol tree where the heart has rotted out

AK Articles

I'm posting links to my articles, partly as a source for developing writers but also to invite reaction and discussion. In my time I've stumbled on some appalling articles at various places on the web. Too bad there is no system for marking quality or usefulness!

While I think articles such as these, and similar articles in print (eg The New Writer or Cambrensis) are useful, I believe that we learn much more by responding to articles, debating issues, sharing examples which illustrate points etc. Typically in Boot Camp a thread, on, say, Theme, starts with a question, involves one or more pasted articles, story segments and then a to-and-fro of sometimes 200 or more posts. The learning in such discussion is stratospheric compared to merely reading an article or a chapter of a how-to book.

That being so, respond, discuss, argue.




Alice Munro: The Short Answer

In Lieu of Preference

A Few Introductory Articles from 1997

If you visit Writers Write Archives and scroll down to the oldest editions you'll find this by me in Issue Two, September 1997. Beginner, Don't Write That Novel.

In November 1997 there's Plotting is a Seven Letter Word and in December How to Open Without a Bang.

These are simpler articles and as the years progressed, generally so did the articles. You can browse through the Writers Write Archives, read, consider, then hopefully ask questions, or argue issues here in this blog.

Beginner, Don't Write That Novel.
Plotting is a Seven Letter Word
How to Open Without a Bang
Dialogue, Seven Sins, a Sinner

Tries Hard, Could Do Better
How to Win Short Story Competitions
How to Write a Query Letter That Sells
Point of View From My Point of View

Two Articles on Show-not-Tell
Seduction Not Instruction (Part I)
Seduction Not Instruction (Part II)

Ten-and-a-Half Commandments of Writing
Dealing With Rejection

Two Articles on Setting
Creating the Perfect Setting I
Creating the Perfect Setting II

Four Articles on Editing
Be Your Own Editor: Part I
Be Your Own Editor: Part II
Be Your Own Editor: Part III
Be Your Own Editor: Part IV

The Art of Telling Lies
What is a Short Story?
Advice For the Younger Fiction Writer
Left, Right, Left, Right: Character!

That last article was February 2000, the next (the 23rd) was December 2002

Theme Music: Tone is Not an Accident
Judging Writing Competitions
Quick! Quick!
Stealing Stories

Oh BTW, I'll write a page one day on sick writing sites. If you want to understand, go to the one mentioned in the article above and say you like Alex Keegan's articles...

The Novice Screenwriter Refuses to Conform
Sing to Me
If You Whisper, Convince
Choosing a Writing Teacher

Think Before You Click
Ironing While Watching TV
Creative Writing Myths
How It Is
Contract Bridge and Writing. How to Become a Grand Master
A Cool, Dark Guinness
Choosing a Writing Teacher


I hope 40 articles is enought to be going on with.


Best Wishes


Alex Keegan

Clocks Forward, Ever Onward

Did you remember?

Here are today's Boot Camp prompts.

They make me feel like it's time for another 7Q Frantic Flash

These prompts will appear at thebootcampkeegandiaries (see links) and if you come here any morning and there are no prompts, chances are they are ove at tbckd

some good ones today


The Prompts



In some ways I still don't

The difference between a mandarin and a tangerine

Three Consecutive Numbers

Confuscius he say "Woman who cook potatoes and pees in same pot, dirty cow"

The quadratics of hate

Moon

The History Boys

Covered in Mud

The Man Who Put the Stars There is Going Home and Wants Them Back




Notes from the Metro

A Million Writers

The act of love lies somewhere between the belly and the mind..

Ten Million Pixels

How blue a blue do you do?

Drop the Rhino

Death by Piano

in Key West so beautiful people come to see



Coca

dark glasses cheap make-up

OK OK All right already

and alone, waiting, still in the dark

Couple in Amber

The keyboard that read minds

POO

Soundsticks, sound, sticks, sound sticks.

A Few Prompts and a Heads Up

Take a look when you can at The BootCamp Diaries (see link on the right).

The URL is http://thebootcampkeegandiaries.blogspot.com/


It's more than possible that daily prompts from BC will appear there. You can also pick up a flavour of the daily activity that goes on there, how members cope with the ups and downs of being a writer.



Here are the Poetry Prompts. Story prompts at the other place


I CHALLENGE Caroline today, and you JOEL.



one of these, or the wrath of Khan


1 A poem with Magic, Beginner(s), Link, a colour.

2 A poem about infidelity that doesn't mention man, woman, husband, wife, or the infidelity

3 A poem or short poetic flash that incorporates and makes different, a nursery rhyme

4 Write a poem that inverts its meaning by the end.

5 Write a what-am-I poem (a poem that describes something and the reader has to work out what) One of these about an anchor, won Bridport one year.

The Boot Camp Diaries

"The Boot Camp Diaries" blog now has the full name and address



http://thebootcampkeegandiaries.blogspot.com/



I was amazed how many address clashes I had. I had to add the keegan to make it unique.


So if you have bookmarked before this time and date your link might not work.





Alex

ON GOD...

Thinking about it, maybe "HE" does worketh in mythterious wayth


First I intended to go to that game, but decided to save the fuel costs (and the planet) because it was on TV and we were likely to lose and my girl would have been on her own for an hour until Mum got home..


Then BANG! Power-cut.

Had I gone Deb & Bridie would have been sat in the dark for two hours.

They would never understand how to light a candle...

So me and PJ played poker by candlelight, Deb & Bridie spent forever in the bathroom with candles flickering






Now last night and today the emails on the footie site are so angry about the game saying it was simply awful, gutless, embarrassing.


So I would have come home, moaning, wishing I hadn't gone, walked in in a bad mood (and then have been blamed for the power cut)



Thanks, G.

Thursday's Prompts

A load of prompts today, and five picture prompts.

Can you mix and match?

What happens if you take at least three items or choose things that "can't" go together?






THE PROMPTS

I was at a loose end and thought I'd walk into town, browse the bookshops and have a long leisurely lunch in Pierre Victoire's.

In an ordinary green field, in middle England, a cow.

After he had died—suddenly and very surprisingly as it turned out...



She has told you to run to daddy and you do.

I remember you talking about the trams, the way they were always full, the way they clanged.

It is Winter, lightless morning, here in the shallow city, soundless and shipwreck-grey,

The apartment is bare, the walls a cheap cream over stains

The ticket-collector is a darkie.

At the front of the bus, well two or three seats in front of me, my first wife was sitting



Running bootsteps crash-splatter past the open pub door

Oh, Beth, my lover, try to laugh.

Behind me the mountains, in front, the sea.

You must lie, it's what you do.

Drunk one night – the bar stank of cheap weed

Sarah has set off from her cottage, slightly downhill,




He stopped for coffee, amazed he could feel so empty

I am the Bastard William

Raining. My wife comes in from work

He began by trying to be nice, but this monster was eating class time.

When I was fourteen I was flying a yellow kite.

Openings: TITLES

Bland, uninteresting, vague or generic titles.

The Dream

The Funeral

John's Story

One Good Turn

Seeing Red

Remembering

The Party

Before the Party

After the Party

Happy Ever After

Counting Your Chickens

Spring

The Trip


You should understand that an editor or a judge gets hundreds of stories with boring, uninteresting, draggy, uninspiring titles, titles which give very little sense of the story.

And if we don't think the writer has tried very hard to create a good title, why should we think they will have tried hard to create a worthwhile story?


WHAT ABOUT?



The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Meredith Toop Evans & His Butty Ernie the Egg

My Dead Brother Comes to America

The Bastard William Williams

The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin

The White Hunter's First Man

The Things They Carried

HP, Cedric and the Flying Saucer in Camden High Street

The Best Girlfriend You Never Had

Tomatoes, Flamingos, Lemmings & Other Interesting Facts

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

The Last Love Letter of Berwyn Phillip Price

The Ruining of Bridget O'Malley

Seven Hills, a Postman, Silly Money




and so on...


A good title doesn't make a bad story good, nor an ordinary story noticeably better, but at least, if it intrigues it keep that editor or judge awake a little longer.

Now if a title also has sparkle, and/or gives a good idea of the story's content, or indicates a certain mood or attitude, that's a huge plus.





alx

OPENINGS: FOURTEEN or MORE SINS

A Corner of my Office




Below is a list of the sort of things I see wrong in openings.

This list may not be comprehensive as this is off the top of my head, but I prefer to work this way, allowing an interaction with Boot Campers (or Blog-Readers) to develop my thoughts.



Characteristics of Bad Openings

Bland, uninteresting, vague or generic titles.

Forced, deliberately dramatic starts (Big Bang)

"Hanging" (unattributed) dialogue openings, often with innocuous dialogue.

Warm-up paragraphs. Weather, place, waking up, "reflections".

Generic language.

Generic voice, lack of personality or spark.

Voices which suggest lack of story-power or weight. Eg "Blokey writing"

Generic story signs, stock situations, stock characters, stock dialogue.

Deliberate vagueness of incident, place, gender, time.

Over-writing, trying to look like a writer. "Cuteness" to cover weakness.

Lack of a sense of direction. Failure to steer the reader's sensibilities.

Unspecificity of mood, theme, intent.

Errors in grammar. Typos.

Poor speed control.


That's a long list of things to do wrong, ways to go wrong. I see such errors almost every day. Not only do these errors alone drag a story down, but they also drag down the reader's expectations. A bad start means the reader (or judge, or editor) is far less likely to forgive small transgressions. The reader is also less likely to focus on the coming paragraphs.

You get one chance to make a first impression. In writing it's rare to overcome a bad one.

So what would be GOOD?



Characteristics of Good Openings

Exciting, interesting, unusual titles which tilt the reader into the story

Stories which do not feel forced. Instead they exude confidence.

Stories which give the reader a sense of where-who-what before dialogue occurs.


Immediacy, conciseness, a sense of "no-waste" everything matters.

Immediate pleasure in the language, and/or a sense of quality.

An interesting voice that feels individual, likeable

A voice suggesting things will matter, will resonant, make us care deeply.

The story immediately seems fresh and not 'me-too'. Novel characters, speech.

A sense that the author is not hiding things. A good feeling of how things will be in the story.

A sense of writerly confidence, even if that means plain words.

A strong sense of control. The writing shapes the reader's mode of acceptance.

A clear tendency to feel a mood. Often a statement or a hint of the theme.

Perfect grammar, diction, No typos.

Pacing is absolutely right

ABSOLUTE PROOF THERE IS A GOD

and he HATES me!


My little team were in a cup final with £100,000 going to the winner

K:O was 19:00 (it was on BBC Wales on Sky)


at PRECISELY 19:00 we had a power cut.


The power came on, Sky booted up, and the first image on screen was:




The referee blowing the final whistle. we lost 0-1

Wednesday Morning Prompts

These aren't mine. Someone beat me to it this morning!

But have at it!

Why not let me know when you manage a flash. Ddi you send it out? Did it get published or do well in a competition?

BTW, yesterday my daughter gave me the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody and said "Make a story out of THAT, then!"

I did. 1410 words. And I used all the words (plus her analysis of the words) in the order they came.

OK, so it isn't "A Silver Dish" but it's OK...






WEDNESDAY's PROMPTS

Growing up, going down

Blizzard!

My friend Fudge

Coming Home

Pete the Cheat

Under the Bridge

Impregnating the Cabbie

Abdominal Knee Crunches, Unzipped

Nursery Rhymes

The Difference between Posing and Posturing

Rock on, Tommy

Race for Life

Two-Faced and Dangerous

Staying in the Closet

Why Little Miss Perfect is Such a Bitch

Listening to the Archers with Dad after a hard day in the garden

After Dinner Mints, Inventive Sex, Indigestion

Poor, Sad, Woman

How to Tie a Hospital Gown

Climbing the Greasy Pole

We're treating his death as suspicious

On Openings

In Boot Camp there's a forum called "John Dream's Asks" There BCers can post awkward craft questions as a fictitious character (John Dreams)... I answer but thinking ahead to another volume of a how-to I'm writing.

Well, it occurs to me that I could open up a subject or ten and invite questions (but anon will get zapped)... so here we go. I'll talk about openings, why they SHOULDN'T be dialogue, why they SHOULDN'T be "big-bang".

I'll be happy to discuss any aspects of openings and will go wherever questions take me, but to kick off, here's an old article of mine that appeared in The New Writer and The Internet Writer's Journal


How to Open WITHOUT a Bang

Grab your reader with an opening! Right? Have a man walk in with a gun, set the bomb ticking, the lovers begin to undress? Oh, how many stories I've seen with a slam-bang start like that, and oh, how many have immediately gone to a flash-back, admitted the dream or simply fizzled, spluttered and dribbled slowly away.

The nuclear bomb opening, I see as the medallion man of literature, more flash than substance, more likely to lead to disappointment than satisfaction. It's the confident whisper, the self-assured promise I look for, the paragraph which quietly says, "I don't need bells and whistles. Listen, listen." And the story may be so quiet that I have to lean forward. I am tilted into the body of the work, disconcerted, or intrigued by setting, attracted by character or seduced, simply seduced, by the sounds and shapes and meaning of the words.

Saturday afternoon and Dai Griffiths sits with his finger-polished roll-up tin. He is patient, fixated, listening. His tongue protrudes slightly as he makes his careful, half dog-end tobacco, half Old Holburn, delicate, thin cigarettes. It is raining outside the pub and along the valley side snake-terraced roofs glisten. The afternoon light closes.

I want to know. And that's all it takes. Make the reader want to know more.

Rather than use the verb "grab" I like to suggest "tilt". I want to push my reader just a little, not slam them so hard they resist me, but persuade them that this road is interesting, one of ultimate promise. My job (first) is to ensure they reach (and want to read) the second paragraph, that the second begets the third and that the whole of the first page is strong enough to quieten the TV, block out the conversation on the train, or more importantly, wake up that tired editor, that jaded judge.

It was now lunch-time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining-tent pretending that nothing had happened.
"Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?" Macomber asked.

A famous opening from a famous story, Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. What's fascinating about this opening is that, yes, the tilt is there - if someone says "pretending that nothing had happened" you betcha I want to find out what did happen - but look what Hemingway chose not to start with. The story has to flash back (eventually) to an incident of high drama when Macomber panicked faced by real danger. Surely, surely, with such a gift we should start with the dramatic action?

But Hemingway had the drama still to come - so we await it. He didn't start with something climactic - after a climax is anti-climax - but promised us at least one. The work shows self-confidence, the ability to present seemingly innocuous events well, but in such a disarming, confident way we simply feel the power to come. But there's more to this opening. It was chosen to guide the reader into what the story was really about, not big-game hunting and cowardice or bravery, but what these things meant to the sexual relationships of the three main characters. By starting with the "ordinary" drinks scene, Hemingway was able to steer us, the readers towards the core of the story. We get to see and feel the coldness and unhappiness of Macomber and his wife - exacerbated by Macomber's lack of physical courage - and it's through courage that Macomber eventually gains self-respect and a fleeting but glorious happiness.

So yes, an opening must promise us a diverting story, but also it should be right for the story, not just a good opener but the best, the aptest opener. When we take time to "find" our opener, to find the exact character, setting, tone of voice and point of view, when we wait and let the opener float until it begins to resonate as solid and true, then, often the story falls in front of us like dominoes, sentence after sentence begetting sentence, driven by the feel, the force, the organic predictability contained within the start.

He wondered what the sex would be like. She thought it would be good. When she asked him, "Do you think it will be good, Harry?" he knew it would be great. But that was later.

Sometimes we just know from the opener…

When I began writing I leaped on ideas, rushed to grab a pen or typewriter, and started. More often than not I crash-landed, and even when I did finish things they sucked and didn't sell. Now I've learned a little patience, an ounce of forethought, a few minutes of consideration and now, rather than dive into a story, I'm more likely to climb into a bath, a half-bottle of wine close by, and wallow, body and mind. My story idea may well be weeks, months, even a year old. It has been fermenting in my unconscious, a particularly unsavoury and mixed up place. I went there once, right next to The Old Man and the Sea was Three Blind Mice, a picture of an old girlfriend, The guitar riff from Pulp Fiction and… the rest is censored. But somewhere in the mess there is a story - at least I hope there is - and I want to coax it out. If I shout, it will run away, if I do nothing it will sit there, but if I just make little coaxing noises, show I'm friendly out pops an opening, a tone, my protagonist, complete with accent and attitude.


I lie. The opening almost comes. Here is where I have another glass of wine and top up the hot water. I've learned that if the opening really comes to me, if the character pushes through the fog and steps into my world, if he is ready to live, really ready, not a good one but the one, then I just know, little bells ring, presses run, music plays, the opening resonates, buzzes, sings. The almost openings flutter in an out but the opening doesn't. It comes with a life, a history, a destiny. Truly, getting the exact feel is more than half the story.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said, "One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily."

Absolutely, Gabriel!

"In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book."

Yes! Yes!

"The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be."

Smack on!

"That's why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again."

(Excellent, he should go far).


Yes, an opening should interest, tilt us forward but an opening does far more, it sets the agenda, it makes not just promises to us, but suggests to us how we should react, what mood we are likely to find here, how best we might take on the upcoming dream.

Tom is watching a movie with his mistress when something in the story-line touches him, and breaks through his well-constructed façade. His defences breached, he thinks of his son and his small daughter. He begins to cry soundlessly. When his mistress realises her lover is upset, she tries to be kind, but her kindness makes the guilt worse and Tom snaps at her. She doesn't understand.

Once there were many prairie dogs and they decided their kingdom was fine and suited the prairie dog way of life. Some prairie dogs were large, some very small, but most of the prairie-dogs were middle-sized and their bark, more a yap, was conservative.

Two openings but the contract with the reader is different.

I hope my openings are directive. I want them to intrigue and seduce but I want them to channel the story as a whole, to create in the reader a sense of a joint adventure, one of a type. If I'm trying to be funny, I need the reader to be thinking light music not Beethoven's Fifth. If I want "serious" I don't want him whistling The Birdie Song. Like Gabriel Marquez, my openings take time but they contain the organic nature of the story as a whole, the theme, the tone, where I'm coming from, where I want the reader to go.

Look at the opening to Catch-22

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this being just short of jaundice all the time confused them.

We get the main character, the tone, the craziness, the feel, immediately.

Or Cuckoo, mine.

Cold Monday morning, six o'clock. November. Brighton sea front had to be grey, windswept and damp. It was, but as far as Caz Flood was concerned, it was the only place, the perfect place to be. Yesterday she had been a beat copper, a woodentop, today she was a DC, a detective constable, and nothing, but absolutely nothing, could stop her now.

Or Brighton again, Graham Greene.

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong - belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd.

Or Raymond Chandler.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Oh, I wish!!