Discussion → A Pattern of Love
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I woke up early on Melanie’s thirty-seventh birthday. I hadn’t planned it, but once I was up with nothing else to do, I cut up fresh strawberries and placed them neatly on top of hot pancakes. When I came into the bedroom, balancing a tray, she shuffled slightly. Her body was sprawled across the bed, and her mouth hung open in a way that had never before made me nauseous until this very moment, on her birthday. I placed the tray on its legs over her torso, and said her name softly. She stirred violently, knocking the hot coffee onto the thin sheet that covered her thigh, and screamed, but I hadn’t meant for her to get hurt; I thought this could be one of our nicer days.
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Love it! I absolutely howled.
Would the first couple of sentences alone make me read the rest of the story? They're certainly not a "hook" and yet, they're well written and tell a lot even in the "I hadn't planned it" that intimates something is changing.
Nice!
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thank you so much for your kind words, susan.
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thanks for pointing me here, susan - i wish there'd be group notifications on fictionaut.
a wonderful piece, laura lee. there is sooo much ambivalence of (old?) lovers here - you suggest that they have a history with each other. i think ambivalence is hard to turn into a hook. the hook says 'you must bite', and these lines say 'i'm a hidden something'. i am struggling to think of a beginning that transports both ambivalence and hooked me right away...most beginnings of longer pieces seem to be descriptive, providing surprise, shock perhaps, or simply detail that makes us curious because it holds the promise of MORE detail...but i'm way out of my depth here thinking above the top of my black cylinder...
for a 6 sentence piece the question of the hook is less important, i think because almost everyone except a london bonds trader with his 2 sec attention span will read on, and by sentence 3 you got them, cuz it's simply sexy: strawberries, sprawl...and all that.
Group Description
Grab the reader.
Post the first line/s of your poems & the first sentence/s of your stories to see if we want to keep reading.
Post as little or as much as you want – it’s your test.
Hook us. We'll let you know if you're there yet.
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