Starting a novel is a nerve-wracking endeavor.
\nIn a few lines, you must:<\/p>\n
Around 1995, I remember Penguin Books ran a contest, giving away an entire library<\/em> of Classics to the person who correctly identified 50 opening lines taken from selected novels under their imprint. <\/p>\n The contest was challenging as it required people to go to the library or bookstores, since e-books at that time were limited to Gutenberg.org, which had less than 1000 public domain works available online before 1997<\/a> – ’95 was not exactly “pre-Internet”, but early days to be sure. <\/p>\n Luckily, I was working at a bookstore at the time, so I slaved away during breaks, scribbling authors and titles on my entry form, trying to decipher which words belonged to whom. For an English nerd, it was a fun game, exposing me to tidbits of great literature, and showing me how Melville, Joyce, Woolf and Flaubert kicked off their stories.<\/p>\n With the proliferation of e-books, Kindles, Kobos and Nooks in the last few years, text is easier to find online, and many authors have websites that give readers first-chapter excerpts. So, I rounded up the opening lines from a wide sampling of popular romance writers, and created a miniature contest of my own. Here is the result: a short, silly quiz. <\/p>\n CAVEAT: I know many of you don’t read romance.<\/em> It doesn’t matter – take the quiz anyhow. It’s very fast, just ten questions, and I promise you’ll get a laugh out of some quotes and most titles; and yes, they’re all real, I didn’t invent anything. Wait ’till you get to the rutabagas. No cheating please!<\/p>\n Romance Novel “Opening Lines” Pop Quiz<\/strong>: if you get all 10 right, I will buy you a timbit.<\/p>\n [QUIZZIN 1] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Starting a novel is a nerve-wracking endeavor. In a few lines, you must: set the tone for the whole book, capture the interest of your prospective audience, impress them enough to buy your work, and avoid millions of cliches (“It was a dark and stormy night…”) Around 1995, I remember Penguin Books ran a contest, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[916],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2118"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2140,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118\/revisions\/2140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}