: Re: Does this opening paragraph grab your attention? (very normal setting) This is the beginning of a short story I'm writing: Jun was standing motionless at entrance of the 7-eleven. He was

@Kimberly114

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If you are going to expose what's going on inside the protagonist's head to the reader, don't waste your time on cliched drivel. Instead, have a packet of something hit the floor, which makes a sound and grabs his attention.

It's some relatively skanky white trash chick, but hot in a way. She dropped a bag of Combos on the floor and bends over to pick it up. He compares some of her features to his wife's. He contemplates whether he would like his wife to have a tattoo on her back like that girl's, weighing his sexual desires against the embarrassment factor, since he's more on the conservative side of the fence. "Perhaps a temporary one," he thinks to himself.
Anyway, then he walks over to the counter with a gallon jug of water and a half gallon of 1% milk. Normally he'd go to the grocery store for that sort of thing, like a normal person. In fact, he only visits a 7-Eleven maybe once in five years, and even then it's probably to ask for directions, which never works out too well by the way.
He's behind three other customers, the first two are an interracial couple buying several candy items and a 2-liter of Mountain Dew. Their bill comes to .62 and he thinks to himself, "Oh my gosh that's expensive for so little. I'm glad I'm not wasting my money on that junk."
It's half past ten on a Friday and a man wearing a green army surplus jacket, faded jeans, and a ski mask walks in the front door waving a hand gun. Crap, what would Stallone do?

I mean, have something happen, not just some boring thoughts going through the protagonist's head. Nobody thinks about Alzheimer's when they forgot what they needed at the store. They just think to themselves how dumb they are for not making a list after having the same thing happen to them 1000 times before.

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