Opening Paragraph to My Novel

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),

Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!

Anyway let's get right to it,

The Earth trembled underneath him as if rattling its final breath before surrendering to the lightning clashes above. He lay upon the rock staring unconsciously at the sky as his naked back arched in agony. A thousand teeth pierced his flesh as he relived events in memory. Bloody chest heaving up and down against its very will, one fleeting thought snagged at his mind: he’d never thought he would go like this. The intense throbbing awakened him to reality, but all he could do was cling to that one thought as if it could keep him from slipping further away into the pain.

Okayy....it appears we have ourselves a bit of a first paragraph and well..considering its only that...I shall go ahead and be a bit harsh on this one and nitpick a bit because well...this is after all arguably the most important paragraph of a novel...and its a good idea to get this one about as good as you can make it.

And okay, it appears we are starting with a lot of tactile imagery there, cause wow, that is quite a lot of pain to get a story started off in and right off the bat you can almost feel that this person is in a lot of pain and some terrible things are going on in the background. It also appears that this person is quite possibly going to be killed off here or at least get pretty close to dying or at least has accepted they are going to die...cause that's just the general tone of their thoughts there.

Well...in general its just a suuper intense little paragraph, that definitely makes you take notice there....this is definitely the sort of first paragraph that will absolutely get your attention and in general I think it actually manages to do its job as a first paragraph quite well. I'm certainly quite intrigued here and thi seems like something I would continue reading on from. It looks like some cool things are going on here.

Aaaaand that's it for this one.

As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.

Stay Safe
Harry

Hey emjayc, here for a quick review!

The Earth trembled underneath him as if rattling its final breath before surrendering to the lightning clashes above.

For the purpose of making an impact, I think this opening sentence would be better if you ended it after the word 'breath'. This is personal preference, really, but it's just something to think about.

He lay upon the rock staring unconsciously at the sky as his naked back arched in agony

I'm a little confused... How can he be staring if he's unconscious?

Silly nit-picks aside, I think you have a good opener here. I love that we readers are thrown right into the action, and I'm definitely intrigued to find out what's actually going on here. I don't have an awful lot to go on as this is only an opening paragraph, but from what I've read so far I reckon this novel has a lot of potential. Your descriptions are good and well-balanced (you don't go overboard on them or anything), so kudos to you for that.

In terms of any substantial critiques, I guess the only thing I can really conjure up is sentence structure, mood e.t.c. At the moment, your sentences are all similar lengths and they don't vary much. The problem with this is that the same mood stays throughout the paragraph, which isn't necessarily a massive issue, but in a scene like this varying your sentences can be really effective. The main thing is that you don't really have any short sentences, and short sentences can work brilliantly for intense scenes like this one. I'd suggest shortening some here and there, even just splitting some in half so that they form several sentences as opposed to just one. Does that make any sense?

Other than that, I can't think of anything to critique. I see you've noted that 'Undecided Title' is the rest of this chapter, so I'll check that out as soon as I can because I'm intrigued now. Sorry I couldn't be of much help!

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins