Next up on my opening page series is from The Omega Game:
Quaid Loman woke up— or at least became fully aware of his surroundings— sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bed. His hands shook, sweat dripped down the back of his neck, and he needed a drink more than at any time in the past six months.
He tried to remember the previous night, and he couldn’t.
Quaid rubbed the palms of his hands deep into the orbits of his eyes, and fairy ghosts of color shot across the insides of his eyelids. It was a reflex, born from other long nights he couldn’t remember, and the longer mornings that followed.
It took him a few moments before he was awake enough to realize that the hangover blood-throb— the price of admission for such an evening— was absent.
Even so, Quaid’s breathing was measured, careful. His body still expected the pain. When he finally moved, it was with a slow deliberation, restrained by a fear that was almost an ache itself— the anticipation sharp as it had ever been.
Not just the first drink, Quaid’s barely rational thoughts stepped on themselves, the first thought of drink.
As if to mock him, the pain refused to come.
The opening of any story has to hook the reader and get them invested in what’s happening in the story. One of the best ways to do that is by presenting a character with a problem. Quaid here has a problem, and by the end of this passage its clear that it’s not the one we, or Quaid, first expects. Amnesia is usually a cheap plot device, but here it’s subverted by having a character who’s experienced blackouts before. The hook then becomes not the cliché, “what did I do?” But the stranger question, “why is this particular blackout different?”
