<story><title>First 26 pages of Neal Stephenson&apos;s new novel Seveneves</title><url>http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-excerpt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MagicWishMonkey</author><text>Anathem was kind of a slog for the first 200-250 pages, but then it started to get good, and then awesome, by the end of the book my mind was thoroughly blown.</text></item><item><author>ceequof</author><text>It seems like my first knee-jerk impression of every Stephenson novel of the last decade has been &amp;quot;ugh, terrible&amp;quot;, gradually replaced by a retrospective fondness after finishing it.&lt;p&gt;The first couple pages of Seveneves certainly does not impress, but maybe I&amp;#x27;ll like it better after reading the whole thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>imglorp</author><text>Vonnegut spoke at my convocation.  His advice for fiction writers was to write your whole work and then throw away the first chapter, thus dumping your reader into the action.  He despised setup.</text></comment>
<story><title>First 26 pages of Neal Stephenson&apos;s new novel Seveneves</title><url>http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-excerpt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MagicWishMonkey</author><text>Anathem was kind of a slog for the first 200-250 pages, but then it started to get good, and then awesome, by the end of the book my mind was thoroughly blown.</text></item><item><author>ceequof</author><text>It seems like my first knee-jerk impression of every Stephenson novel of the last decade has been &amp;quot;ugh, terrible&amp;quot;, gradually replaced by a retrospective fondness after finishing it.&lt;p&gt;The first couple pages of Seveneves certainly does not impress, but maybe I&amp;#x27;ll like it better after reading the whole thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t write fiction but when I write longer-form articles, whitepapers, and so forth I find that a good percentage of the time I end up going back and chopping out a good bit of what a former boss described as &amp;quot;throat clearing&amp;quot; at the beginning. Not always; sometimes by chance I hit on a good metaphor or story or some other lead-in that works. But at least as often it&amp;#x27;s way too much digression and backstory and setup in advance of getting to the actual topic at hand.&lt;p&gt;With respect to Anathem in particular a lot of the problem is you didn&amp;#x27;t really understand what was going on for quite a while and I found that made it a bit of an effort to keep going.</text></comment>