Consider the First Line

[The First of Three Installments]

When you buy a book, do you use the Amazon book description (full of soft ambiguous words), or the jacket copy (a torrid one hundred words), or a friend’s recommendation, or the New Yorker 3000 word review? Consider the first line instead. The author will have put her most work into the first line and the last. Pay attention, and perhaps you’ll get the book you want. Pay attention and perhaps your first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader.

This is not one of those formulaic pieces of advice where you are exhorted to include two or four or five key elements in your first sentence in order to have a winning start to your book. Writers Digest tells you to use direction, (no static) characterization, distinctive voice, and basic plot (conflict), but then, they are into pat answers. Instead, there is a list of a couple of dozen or so examples that could be imitated, or could be used as thought exercises—how did the author do that? First lines are highly creative, so there's not going to be a formula.

Set the norm, then destroy it. In other words, strive to build momentum.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” -- Nabokov, Lolita

[What has Nabokov done here? Establishes the antagonist of the novel by naming her, made her central (holy) to the protagonist, and then in a third clause accelerated the supposed relationship down into a sexual level.]

Don't start too early. Here are a couple of examples where Dickens, who was garrulous, may have started too soon, or has started at a dead stop with a static introduction. There's also an example that starts right where the trouble begins.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

[Do we care about the statement of purpose? We don't yet care about Copperfield. Will his life be at all of interest? Do we keep reading because the author’s name is Dickens?]

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

[All of these “on the other hands” before we get to the primary word that lets us know this will be a novel of conflict and significant risk—“despair.” I'm pointing out that after 60 words we are still nowhere.]

“The day I finished my best story yet—about a social worker whose child gets Lyme disease, slips into a coma, suffers brain damage, becomes a burden to his father—after I typed it, retyped it, and mailed it off to the Timber Wolf Review, my wife, Martha, came home from work and, just like that, asked me to leave our apartment forever.” —John Dufresne, Love Warps The Mind A Little.

Next Week We’ll Consider Small Hooks