The world of writing

Opening sentences and their impact on the reader.

When I started this page, I did a lesson on the importance of the first line of a book and I quoted the phrase, “The first sentence sells the book, the last sentence sells the next book.” The purpose of that lesson was to explain why an opening paragraph of description about how the trees look, how the houses look; the mundane detail of the surroundings are a loss. You will not keep the interest of your readers and more importantly, if you are shopping your story, the most important reader, the publisher will toss it before the story had a chance to fly.

Great authors for centuries have given this important advice, “Make every word count.” They have also recommended your story carry the plot with it as it develops, that you are going toward a finish line at all times, especially from word one. That’s confusing for most writers. It almost sounds like the advice is saying you must be reminding the reader at all times what the plot is, but that’s far from the truth. What it’s suggesting is the means will justify the end. Because of that, the means, (the story as it is developing) is telling us something about the interconnectedness of all the parts. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give the recipe header. If this is Quiche Lorraine being made, we need to know that up front. In that way, we are seeing something identifiable come together. Watching you bake it will be our story. How YOU do it in your own unique way, what temperature, what ingredients, and ultimately if it’s any good, will be your story.

Openings have had to evolve from the best ones already written. What we know about openings, is they excite us to pay attention. The earliest openings went something like this, “Gather around and I will tell you a scary story.” We are intrigued. We came to the cave man campfire hoping Uncle Grog was about to tell a scary story and not one where he took Aunt Ug by the hair and made love to her. (We hate that story.) Thanks to Uncle Grog taking the best opening, we have had to be more creative in our openings to keep the attention of the reader and not be a carbon copy of Uncle Grog, RIP. What we discovered, we could have a direct approach and let the reader know about the events unfolding, or we could use a trick where we write something off kilter and the reader is intrigued by the meaning.

Here are some of the widely accepted HOOKING opening lines in literature. We will come back and discuss what they have in common.

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

2. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

3. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

4. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984

5. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

6. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

7. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial

8. "Until Jenny Marshland was called to the stand, the judge was deplorably sleepy." Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane.

9. 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

10. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved

11. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting

12. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

So what do we see? We see openings that compel us to read on. Some of them are so obscure that we read on to make sense of the opening (1984). Some are metaphors for the totality of the story (Cass Timberlane). Some give us the recipe (Anna Karenina). What all these authors realized is where their finish line was and how to get us there without delay. They gave us a reason to read line after line. Whether the sentence is as simple as, “Call me Ishmael,” or as complex as “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting,” we are drawn to it. It is the opening line, the most important line of the book.

It is important to note that with rare exceptions, opening lines start out with narrative and not dialogue. Those that do start with dialogue, invariably use the vehicle of the peculiar.

13. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

Her dialogue isn’t mundane and the reader immediately thinks, “Where is she?” Dialogue is very difficult to pull off and seldom recommended as an opening.

A good lesson to practice is to see if you can tell your story in one sentence. If you can do that, you can identify with clarity where the finish line is, and can more adeptly create the starting gun to your race.

I will give you the opening line to my first novel and the reason for why I wrote it in the way I did.

• On Christmas Eve 1978 I was eleven years old and Daddy had me tucked away in the back of his favorite lounge.

My purpose was to create something which the reader would say, “What is an 11 year old doing in a lounge on Christmas Eve?” Creating a line where the reader wants to find that reason out. Once they found that out, it’s my job to make them find something else out. On and on until we reach the finish line and have connected all the interconnecting points into a finished product.