Catching up with reading back issues of the London Review of Books [why don’t I just read it when it arrives in the post?] I came across this quote in Christopher Tayler’s essay length review of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 Book 1 and Book 2, and 1Q84 Book 3,
“At his best, he [Murakami] ... has a compulsive storyteller’s ability to hustle the reader over the threshold of assent and create a feeling of being led into a coherent inner landscape.”
He's describing the literary equivalent of ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ Of course we’re all far too literary and worldly to respond to the nursery question. And yet isn’t that what a global bestseller such as Murakmi is tapping into? Our instatiable desire for a story?
So, as you re-draft your first chapter, that’s what you’re aiming for - to hustle the reader over the threshold and have them believe in your fictional world. You probably have less than a page in which to achieve it.
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