Consider The First Lines

How Droll Is That?

Shopping for a new book? 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. Don't follow (a Writer's Digest) Formula. 

This Isn’t Kansas Anymore

Let the reader think they are in the regular universe, and then throw in a shock so that they are disoriented and asking, Where the hell am I?

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school – all in effect abandoned in the sky – the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly his own studio apartment on the 25th floor was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish-ground. This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach himself from his two thousand neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and irritations that provided their only corporate life, it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place – on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind-quarter of the Alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school.” -- J.G. Ballard, High Rise

[The dog? Then a diversion where the setting is a high rise like a prison. Telephone books, yet we’re going off to a lecture?]

Shock the reader then restart earlier in time or mess with time

In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me. Our sweet Leah was not quite two when my wife, Shyla, stopped her car on the highest point of the bridge and looked over, for the last time, the city she loved so well. — Pat Conroy, Beach Music

[Each sentencre carries a different emotional freight]

Be Droll

A sum of money is a character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees. The sum was $87,472,033.61 on June 1, 1964 … — Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater