Consider The First Lines

Consider the First Lines

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 examples that could be used as deep reads—how did the author do that? First lines are highly creative, so there's not going to be a formula.

If you open with weather, be very good at it.

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

[I don’t think so.]

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

[The difference between Edward GB-L and Carl is a melodramatic casting of weather in order to establish atmospherics —versus a simple metaphor.]

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” —William Gibson, Neuromancer [The defining voice of cyberpunk and dystopianism]

Establish the tone of the novel, launch the protagonist, and let the reader know that she will be jarred by sensibilities that are not hers.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Something really weird was happening in the Gorbals – from the battered hulk of the Planet Cinema in Scobie Street, a deep sea diver was emerging.” — Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing!

[This could have fit in to the altered universe section, or small hooks, or opening at a distance. But it establishes humor, irony, tone, and believe it or not, the setting of a working-class Scots ghetto (by the words Gorbals, battered, Scobie)].

Use violence and shock.

“They shoot the white girl first.” —Toni Morrison, Paradise

[We know so little, but we know that it's a gang or a mob, that there is violence against women, and that race comes into it.]

“So now get up.” Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen: knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard . . . One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. — Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall.

[Who is the monster who is speaking? Who is the protagonist? Where are we and why? But the violence is quite clear and is the glue that binds the reader to the next paragraph.]

Next week, otherworldliness