Consider the First Lines
- Scott Archer Jones
- May 17
- 2 min read
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. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader.
Grab the Character
If you are writing a book about A person, the best decision may be to seize on that person in the first few lines. Voice is key here, if it be the narrator’s voice or the character’s. If the reader wants to know intensely about the protagonist right away, you have sold a book.
I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France. —Lauren Groff, Matrix: A Novel (2021)
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
The front cover of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and his first sentence of the book are great examples of Grab the Character. It all ties together for the reader: The title, the visual book cover showing in black a solitary figure standing on what appears to be the edge of a boat with water around, the sunset or sunrise in the background, along with the first sentence describing the protagonist. I believe the colors on this book cover also set the stage for the book. Scott, this is a great craft - both visual and written.
I’m all about the first lines and then the first paragraph. I may read a book review, but book reviews are written by people looking to write more book reviews so they have to be careful what they write. That’s my opinion. But whatever you have to do to pull people in that’s what you gotta do.