Step Into The Story

I'm a huge fan of the Happy Ever After. It doesn't matter which genre I'm reading, I still want to feel warm and satisfied and, yes reassured, when I get to the end of a book. Of course this doesn't work out well for me sometimes. My favourite reads include crime and thrillers and although the ending may satisfy in the sense that the mystery is solved and the bad guys caught, there's an unhappy ending for someone, usually the corpse. If the victim wasn't very pleasant then that's fine. That's why I enjoy watching Midsomer Murders. Maybe that's also why I don't read much gritty crime with random violence in it. I hear enough about that on the news. And then there's non-fiction. I love reading historical biographies but frankly I know that if I'm reading about Anne Boleyn, for example, then there's an appointment with the executioner waiting and history isn't going to change. So even as I read the book I'm preparing myself. Wh...

A couple of months ago on one of my writing loops we were discussing hot starts, those first lines of books that grab you and draw you in right from the off. I love hot starts; maybe it's because I can be an impatient reader, wanting something to happen, wanting to be swept away at the beginning of the book. There is a school of thought that says that modern life has trained people to have such a short attention span that if you don't grab them within 10 seconds you've lost them. I'd hate to think that I had the concentration of a gnat but maybe there is something in this. One of my favourite first lines is: "I picked four of them up at White Waltham in the new Cherokee Six 300 that never got a chance to grow old." This, from Dick Francis's book Rat Race , flags up the drama that is to come, creates a sense of expectation and already has me on the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens. It's short, sharp and direct with an element of danger. We...