And only a lawyer would think the word “addenda” would attract a reader…
Anyway, earlier this week I complained about a silly agent whose “rules” for the first line in your novel include “No waking up” and “don’t start with dialogue.”
It was pointed out to me that some very successful novels begin just that way.
In Hunger Games the protagonist starts the day by hunting food for her family.
Oh, excuse me, the novel begins with her waking up:
“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.”
But, of course, this book was a dismal failure. No one read it. No one ever wanted to make a movie out of it. It didn’t sell millions of copies and start a whole new dystopian genre of teens being put to the test…
Wait. It actually did. Even though it starts with Kitness waking up.
Good thing Susan Collins sent this to an agent who had a brain in her head instead of “Rules” she slavishly followed.
Or how about that obscure story by Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis:
“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.”
But our agent in the seminar would have immediately rejected this work of literature because Gregor is waking up. So a major work of Western Literature would never have seen the light of day.
Good thing ol’ Franz wrote it and published it before you needed an agent to get anywhere.
Finally, on the dialogue front, there’s this little gem from an obscure novel that never went anywhere:
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
Yeah, that’s from The Satanic Verses, a book by Salmon Rushdie which was so ineffective that Ayatollah Khomeni put out a hit on him for writing it. Probably because he started with dialogue.
I hope I’ve made my point.
Mark Bruce, Writer 