{"id":2223,"date":"2009-07-06T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2009-07-06T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/?p=2223"},"modified":"2009-07-08T12:07:48","modified_gmt":"2009-07-08T20:07:48","slug":"overwrought-openings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/writing\/overwrought-openings\/","title":{"rendered":"Overwrought openings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many great books begin on a quiet note — think of Tolstoy’s “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” or Ford’s “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” for example.<\/p>\n

But some writers take the opposite tack. I just encountered this extraordinary opening sentence to chapter one of The Perenial Garden <\/em>by Jeff and Marilyn Cox:<\/p>\n

When the dynosaurs shrieked in the primordial night, and the world’s highest law was to eat or be eaten, there were no flowers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You won’t find a sentence like that in many gardening books (he shrieked).<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many great books begin on a quiet note — think of Tolstoy’s “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2224,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2223\/revisions\/2224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}