I do not, in general, like hook beginnings. Some stories want a hook, and some want a net. Mind you, I'm OCDish enough that I have only once that I can remember since 1990 not finished a novel that I started. Your milage may vary - and probably does, because I think in kilometres.
Three opening paragraph(ish)s of mine:
--
To tell a tale should be a simple thing. They are not little deeds, these
of which I write. To set down heroic acts as they occurred, one after the other
in order from beginning to end, should be enough to bring into being a romance
fit to fire a dead man's heart. And yet it is not. Before quill touch scroll
or spell of remembrance mark the world, there are a thousand thousand decisions
to be made. I have cursed my tale and consigned it to perdition in yonder fire
more times than you would well credit, and yet. And yet. The story must be
told. I do not doubt that some wretched poxy half-telling of those times has
made its way to your ear - minstrels will earn their drink on it until all
worlds' end, and with no more of truth in their recitals than in any other
tawdry ballad told over a fire. I wish my tale to shine forth true and bright
as steel, and find myself at once perplexed.
--
There had been thirty thousand humans on the Cyrano de Bergerac when it arrived in this system; thirty thousand individuals of that extroverted, fascinating, endlessly strange species had come to live on the planet which they named Elysium, a hundred and fifty Earth years and nearly two hundred of the planet's own in the past. DeepSight had no idea how many more lives thirty thousand humans might bring into being over that span of time, with a whole planet to fill, but the number would not be small.
According to the signals there were twenty-eight of them left alive in the Elysium system.
--
They think they understand it, now, this Secretary of State Linebarger and his bleedin' shadow soldiers. They give me these books to read and take my notes and comments as if it mattered. They think they know where it began and why it came out this way and why the rats are here in the Big Apple after my hide, after so long. And maybe they do. But they weren't there at the beginning, and I was, before anyone knew who Onkel Adolf was, before the Iron Moons and Mosley and the Bomb and everything. To listen to them, you'd think it was that poor mad bastard in Serbia who set the course of the twentieth century, but I was there ten years later when the shot came that really changed history, shivering in the rain on Upper Mount Street in ratty old pants and boots way too big for me, in O'Sullivan's squad that had made a bollocks of things as usual, waiting for word from the Big Fella to tell us what to do next. Seemed so little at the time, just another street fight in a city full of street fighting, but I remember it, oh yes; March 22nd in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-eight, at half-past ten in the morning. I was there the day Jack Kennedy died.
