Incipit is the third person of the present tens of the Latin verb incipere and means "it begins".

In modern literary criticism we call “incipit” the first sentence, or even the first paragraph, of a novel or a poem.

If you forgive me the rough simplification, it’s a little like the visit card of a literary composition, the element which lets us have an idea of what we are going to meet.

The incipit of a novel allows us to guess, to perceive characters and their future developments, the landscapes of mind which we are going to explore, by reading the following pages.

Many novels have deeply effective “incipit” which remain in the collective memory.

As example I have chosen here one of the most famous, the incipit of “Anna Karenina” by Lev Tolstoy.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”

Very often the great authors teach us the infinite value of concise simplicity, while the average ones think that adding a lot of elaborated wordy decorations can give importance to a work, which is not strong enough to support itself.

Tolstoy, in a line, already gives us perfectly the atmosphere and the theme of his novel.
If we cannot make ourselves understood with the essential, we cannot get any better results adding too much of superfluous.

It seems to me that this basic rule is valid in all fields.

I have always liked playing with my feelings for literary characters and comparing them with other readers’ impressions.

I do think it’s an enjoyable and rather valid little test to understand something of our own personality and to have a different perspective over others’ one.

The mechanism is simple; one considers the characters of a novel, without looking necessarily for any affinity or similitude in places, time and events.

The choice must be based only on spontaneous and irrational liking or disliking.

Which is your favorite character of “ Anna Karenina” and which one do you really dislike?

There is not any need to motivate the choice, it’s even better to not motivate it at all, to avoid all risks of rational conditioning values.

All authors, composing a novel, have feelings for their characters, feelings of different sign, either negative or positive.