Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Straub

There is something almost indecently confident about Straub locating certainty at the first sentence, the earliest possible moment a novel can betray you. But the line isn’t bragging so much as it is staking out a writer’s private weather report: that rare, bodily jolt when an idea stops being “material” and starts behaving like a living system. “Reassuring charge of excitement” is the tell. Reassurance implies risk has been accruing offstage: drafts that won’t cohere, voices that won’t show up, the long professional dread that you’re about to write another good failure.

Straub’s phrasing doubles as a small demystification of craft. He doesn’t claim a grand vision arrived, or that the character announced herself in a trance. He pinpoints a technical threshold - “its first sentence” - where tone, cadence, and point of view snap into place. For a horror writer especially, that’s the moment the spell either takes or breaks. The first sentence is the contract: it promises what kind of fear, what kind of intelligence, what kind of control you’re in for. When he says “I knew it was going to work,” “work” isn’t just commercial success; it’s machinery. A novel “works” when its internal rules hold, when dread pays off, when character and language keep generating pressure.

The subtext is a defense of instinct earned through labor. Only someone who has written enough dead pages recognizes the miracle of a page that suddenly isn’t dead.