Flashing the Mob
22 December 2010
So I’m reading the Sisters in Crime listserve and come across an email about a new take on Flash Mobs. This time not a dance or song flash mob, (Since I can’t dance and tone deaf does not even begin to explain my daughter’s dread that anyone could hear me singing and thus insisted we go to the sparsely attended early service at St. Stephen’s, dance or song flash mobs will never be my thing.) but a group of people one after another reading the first lines of their favorite novels.
Cool.
But I misread the email. I thought she said the first line of our own projects. HUH! And it finally got through to me. After all the workshops, courses, books, and advice on how essential it is that my book hook the reader immediately, this finally cracked the glacier riding my brain.
If I stood in a mall, and it came my turn to read that first line, and I had to keep the energy going, had to hook the crowds, could I? If I only had that one line before the next reader stepped up, not a chapter, not a page, not a paragraph, could I do it? Did my first line capture the attention of a mob of people?
And I went back to the YA fantasy I’m working on. Yep. I changed the first line. Tell me what you think. And if you like send me a first line you changed from fine to SUPERB.
Here’s the old first sentence:
“Until today I pretty much thought I was seriously special.”
And here’s my revision. Would it keep the energy going in a flash mob?
“So it turns out I’m not a fire witch.”
Kath
