What do you like in an opening of a fantasy novel?

Question

I'm just asking for general opinions, things like "jumping straight into the action." or "taking time to explain characters/situations". Lots of opinions are welcome.

Answer 1

In my opinion, the opening of a fantasy novel shouldn't be - in general terms - much different from that of any other good novel. That is, the writer should try to grab the reader's attention right at the outset by some intriguing dialog/monologue, some vivid, arresting descriptive passage or by introducing a character/characters that immediately excite the reader's interest.
Once you've "hooked" the reader, then, as usual, you'd want to put the (rest of the) main characters and the setting(s) into the mix and get the plot rolling.

Answer 2

It depends on the author's style. Robert Jordan is very good at the "funnel technique"; that is, he begins broadly, describing the general surroundings, the characters, in the prologue, but he connects it to the plotline, setting up everything that's about to take place in the book (which is a LOT; many times he has three or more different stories taking place simultaneously). However, he's one of the few authors that can do it effectively, in my opinion; in most cases I think it's best to have dialogue interspersed with descriptions of the surrounding, background history, etc to set up the novel.

Answer 3

I wanted you to have this. It is part of a lecture I give to gifted students in the Early Entrance Program at Cal-State Univ Los Angeles where the average age of graduation from college is 15.(seriously)

"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: WORLD LIST"

THE ANCIENT WORLD

Old Testament
Homer
Aeschylus (524?—456 B.C.)
Thucydides
Sophocles (495—406 B.C.)
Euripides (480—406 B.C.)
Plato (429—347 B.C.)
Aristotle (384—322 B.C.)
Lucretius (99—55 B.C.)
Cicero (106—43 B.C.)
Virgil (70—19 B.C.)
New Testament
Petronius (died 65 A.D.)
St. Augustine (354—430 A.D.)
THE MIDDLE AGES

Song of Roland
Dante Alighieri (1265—1321)
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313—1375)
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340—1400)
Sir Thomas Malory (1410—1471)

THE RENAISSANCE

Desiderius Erasmus (1466—1536)
Baldesar Castiglione (1478—1529)
Niccolo`Machiavelli (1469—1527)
Francois Rabelais (1494—1553)
Benvenuto Cellini (1500—1571)
Miguel de Montaigne (1533—1592)
Edmund Spenser (1552—1599)
Miguel De Cervantes (1547—1616)
William Shakespeare (1564—1616)

NEOCLASSICISM

John Milton (1608—1674)
Jean-Baptiste Moliere (1622—1673)
Jean Racine (1639—1699)
Alexander Pope (1688—1744)
Francois Voltaire (1694—1778)

ROMANTICISM

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778)
Johann Wolf-gang Von Goethe (1749—1832)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788—1824)
William Wordsworth (1770—1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834)
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792—1822)
John Keats (1795—1821)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809—1824)
Robert Browning (1812—1889)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809—1849)
Walt Whitman (1819—1892)
Nathaniel Hawthorn (1804—1864)
Herman Melville (1819—1891)

REALISM AND NATURALISM

Honore De Balzac (1799—1850)
Gustave Flaubert (1821—1880)
Charles Dickens (1812—1870)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821—1881)
Leo Tolstoy (1828—1910)
Anton Chekov (1860—1904)
Henrik Ibsen (1828—1906)

SYMBOLISM AND MODERN SCHOOL

Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867)
Arthur Rimbaud (1854—1891)
Alexander Blok (1880—1921)
William Butler Yeats (1865—1939)
Federico Garcia Lorka (1899—1936)
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926)
John Millington Synge (1871—1909)
T.S. Eliot (1888—1948 Nobel Prize for Literature)
James Joyce (1882—1941)
Andre Gide (1869—1951)

Thomas Mann (1875—1955)
Franz Kafka (1883—1924)
Marcel Proust (1871—1922)
William Faulkner (1885—1930)
Raul Brandao (1867?—1930)

EEP Honors Engiish
Caucer by E.J. Priestley for Honors English EEP Students
Caucer (1340-1400) Cantebury Tales are a series of tales told by Geoffery Caucer (1340-1400). The tales describe the experiences and feelings of twelve pilgrims on their way to Canterbury England and the Shrine of Thomas Beckett who was martyred there in 117
Note: Comparative English language note: Caucer died in the year 140 The English Caucer spoke, wrote and understood was as different as the English written and spoken by Shakespeare as Shakespeare’s English is different to the English, which is spoken and written today.

The Tales:
The Knights
The Miller’s
The Reeve’s
The Wife’s Bath’s
The Friar’s
The Clerk’s
The merchant’s
The Franklin’s
The Pardoner’s
The Shipman’s
The Prioress’s
The Nun’s Priest
The Words necessary to understand Canterbury Tales:

clep(en): name, call
danngerous: aloof, cool
eke: also
fetis: pretty, neat
bent: seize
hight: named, called
ilke: that, same
lever: rather
lewd: ignorant, layman
list: want, (… the which me list …)
ne: a negation (e.g., n’is, n’as, isn’t, wasn’t; n’ill—will not, n’ould, wouldn’t)
sentence: option, meaning
sickerly: certainly
stint: stop
swink: work
trow: guess, think
wend (end): go
whilom: once upon a time
wiste: knew
wood: mad
wot: knows


POST MORDERNISM

Nobel Prize in Literature 2005: Harold Pinter

2004: Elfriede Jelinek
2003: John Maxwell Coetzee
2002: Imre Kertesz
2001: V.S. Naipaul
2000: Gao Xingjian
1999: Gunter Grass
1998: Jose Saramago
1997: Dario Fo
1996: Wislawa Szymorska
1995: Seamus Heaney
1994: Kenzaburo Oe
1993: Toni Morrison
1992: Derek Walcott
1991: Nadine Gordimer
1990: Octavio Paz
1989: Camilo Jose Cela
1988: Naguib Mahfouz
1987: Joseph Brodsky
1986: Wole Soyinka
1985: Claude Simon
1984: Jaroslav Seifert
1983: Sir William Golding
1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1981: Elias Canetti
1980: Czelaw Milosz
1982: Odysseus Elytis (pen-name of Odysseus Alepoudhelis)
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977: Vincente Aleiandre
1976: Saul Bellow
1975: Eugenio Montale
1974: Eyvind Johnson & Harry Martinson (Prize divided equally between the two)
1973: Patrick White
1972: Heinrich Boll
1971: Pablo Neruda
1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1969: Samuel Beckett
1968: Yasunari Kawabata
1967: Miguel Asturias
1966: Shmuel Agnon & Nelly Sachs (Prize divided equally between the two)
1965: Michail Sholokhov
1964: Jean-Paul Sartre
1963: Giorgos Seferis (pen-name of Giorgos Seferiadis)
1962: John Steinbeck
1961: Ivo Andri’c
1960: Saint-John Perse (pen-name of Alexis Leger)
1959: Salvatore Quasimodo
1958: Boris Pasternak
1957: Albert Camus
1956: Juan Jimenez
1955: Halldor Laxness
1954: Ernest Himingway
1953: Sir Winston Churchill
1952: Francois Mauriac
1951: Par Fabian Lagerkvist
1950: Betrand Russell
1949: William Faulkner
1948: Thomas Sterns Eliot
1947: Andre Gide
1946: Hermann Hesse
1945: Gabriela Mistral (pen-name of Lucila Godoy Y Alca-Yaga)
1944: Johannes Jensen
1943--1940: Prize money was allocated to the Main Fund (1/3) and the Special Fund (2/3) of this Prize Section
1939: Frans Sillanpaa
1938: Pearl Buck (pen-name of Pearl Walsh Sydenstricker)
1937: Roger Martin Du Gard
1936: Eugene O’Neill
1935: Prize money was allocated to the Main Fund (1/3) and the Special Fund (2/3) of this Prize Section
1934: Luigi Pirandello
1933: Ivan Alekeyevich Bunin
1932: John Galsworthy
1931: Erik Karlfeldt
1930: Sinclaire Lewis
1929: Thomas Mann
1928: Sigrid Undset
1927: Henri Bergson
1926: Grazia Deledda (pen-name of Grazia Deledda)
1925: George Bernard Shaw
1924: Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (pen-name of Reyment)
1923: William Butler Yeats
1922: Jacinto Benavente
1921: Anatole France (pen-name Jacque Anatole Thibaulk)
1920: Knut Hamsun
1919: Carl Spitteller
1918: Prize money was allocated to the Special Fund Prize Section
1917: Karl Adolph Gjellerup & Henrik Pontoppidan—Prize divided
1916: Carl Gustaf Verner Von Heidenstam
1915:Romain Rolland
1914: Prize money was allocated to the Special Fund Prize Section
1913: Rabindranath Tagore
1912: Gerhart Hauptmann
1911: Count Maurice Polidore Maeterlinck
1910: Paul Heyse
1909: Selma Otillia Lovisa Lagerlof
1908: Rudolf Eucken
1907: Rudyard Kipling
1906: Giosue Carducci
1905: Henrk Sienkiewicz
1904: Jose Y Elzaguirre & Frederic Mistral—Prize divided equally.
1903: Bjorstjerne Martinus Bjornson
1902: Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen
1901: Sully Prudhomme (pen-name of Rene Francois Armand)

Pursue clarity
Y

Answer 4

...I really like it when the opening of a fantasy novel begins from the point of view of either the hero/heroine's perception of action already happening, or a secondary character's perception of tghe hero/heroine dealing with action that has already begun. Initial humor mixed with the action always sets a nice tone too.

Answer 5

Something creepy and spine-tingling, like an experience I once had. Driving on a very long journey, I had the feeling that it could easily never end. Everything on the road was familiar, yet it could continue indefinitely... the weird in the everyday.

Answer 6

I say jump straight into action, then have a few flashbacks/explanations along the way, until you get to where you started.

Answer 7

While I agree with JohnSlat about the hook in principle, said hook does not necessarily have to be an immediate part of the fantasy element(s) of the novel to grab me.
In other words, it could be something more common place like: "I woke up late for work, mad at myself for oversleeping again," instead of, "I woke up past the specified chronopoint for my scheduled professional period, mad at myself for overextending my restorative period again."
The above example is definitely cliche, but do you see what I mean?

Answer 8

you could try with something simple and familiar. I would try to focus on something that isn't fantasy (but not for long) and then make an insane jump into the fantasy.

Answer 9

Jumping into the middle of a scene then learning what it meant later.

Answer 10

It should piss the reader off. Some wrong the must be corrected.