Consider The First Lines

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 3,000 word review? Consider the first lines instead. The author will have put her most work into the first lines and the last. Pay attention, and perhaps you’ll buy the book you want. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader.

A Book Shunned For Years, Now Considered Great

Small hooks sometimes catch readers better than large hooks—Things that appear commonplace or small can resonate deeply.

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

[Hurston has immediately given us universality and wistfulness. Our protagonists will be at a great distance from ships and therefore from modern life, and may have no wishes that can ever be met.] {As an aside, Hurston's Book Titles are remarkable -- go look them up}

“On the afternoon of the day when she fails to show up in a judge's chambers in Pensacola to finalize her divorce, Kelly Hays swerves her basic-black Mercedes into the valet spot and thumps hard into the curb and pops the gearshift into park, and then she feels a silence rush through her chest and limbs and mind that should terrify her.” — Robert Olen Butler, A Small Hotel.

[Foreshadow: a woman who has been identified as the center of the book is operating outside the norms. She is in serious trouble.]

Put significant stakes into the first line.

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” —Louise Erdrich, Tracks

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” —Anne Tyler,Back When We Were Grownups

Next Week We’ll Consider Stormy Weather