Book Done Yet?: Second Sentence Submission
So why is this —
“At one AM on the morning of her thirty-third birthday, Detective Nita Dodd walked past two dead bodies and her ex-lover to enter Hell, where she met the Devil.”
–a lousy first sentence?
Because after the first sentence comes the second sentence.
Let’s go back to my MFA classes with Lee for a moment. So I’m workshopping the first scene from Tell Me Lies which is still in draft form at that point.
And Lee says, “About this first sentence.”
At that draft stage, the first sentence was “The crotchless black lace bikini underpants lay on the yellow formica counter like a bat in butter.”
“Terrific sentence,” he says, and I brace myself because I know there’s a kicker coming.
“Now where are you going to go?”
Oh, just hell.
The problem with a KILLER first sentence is that you have to follow it. And if the first sentence is really killer, the second sentence is going to be explaining all the crap you put in your first sentence. Like whose underpants and whose Formica counter and why it matters, which means instead of hitting the ground running and moving headlong into my story, I was hitting the ground with a splat and then having to pick myself up and doing the fiction-writing equivalent of dusting myself off: explaining my first sentence.
Yeah, that got rewritten.
So here’s the first sentence I brainstormed yesterday and immediately rejected:
“At one AM on the morning of her thirty-third birthday, Detective Nita Dodd walked past two dead bodies and her ex-lover to enter Hell, where she met the Devil.”
Great, right? Not even close. Because the second sentence is going to have to explain that Hell is just a bar and the Devil is this guy who got shot but not really and the ex-lover isn’t that important and neither is one of the two dead bodies and . . .
That first sentence is a splat that’s going to take me at least another half dozen sentences to pick up and dust off. It’s a terrible first sentence.
But as the first move in trying to brainstorm the disaster of the previous first sentence–
“Detective Nita Dodd spotted her brother as soon as she got out of the car.”
–it’s progress, moving to the opposite end of the first line spectrum. I need to be somewhere in between there. So I’m cogitating.
Which brings us to that second line, the one you can submit to the editor if she likes your first line. It has to keep going. It cannot stop to explain anything, you hit the ground running, now keep running:
Tell Me Lies: “One hot August Thursday afternoon, Maddie Faraday reached under the front seat of her husband’s Cadillac and pulled out a pair of black lace bikini underpants.They weren’t hers.”
Fast Women: “The man behind the cluttered desk looked like the devil, and Nell Dysart figured that was par for her course since she’d been going to hell for a year and a half anyway. Meeting Gabriel McKenna just meant she’d arrived.”
Faking It: “Matilda Goodnight stepped back from her latest mural and realized that of all the crimes she’d committed in her thirty-four years, painting the floor-to-ceiling reproduction of van Gogh’s sunflowers on Clarissa Donnelly’s dining room wall was the one that was going to send her to hell. God might forgive her the Botticelli Venus she’d painted in the bathroom in Iowa, the Uccello battle scene she’d done for the boardroom in New Jersey, even the Bosch orgy she’d painted in the bedroom in Utah, but these giant, glaring sunflowers were going to be His Last Straw. ”
Maybe This Time: “Andie Miller sat in the reception room of her ex-husband’s law office, holding on to ten years of uncashed alimony checks and a lot of unresolved rage. This is why I never came back here, she thought.”
First sentence plants the story, second sentence moves it along.
No splatting.
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