The Big Easy. (That folksy first line, thanks to the Yanks.)
Relax. Take the pressure off yourself as a writer, and relax the reader too. Invite'em in. Go on. Make them at home. Give them the easy chair, the one with the stained cushion and the crumbs in the corner.
Why don't you kick off that novel by kicking back?
The American tradition is especially good at this from Mark Twain to last year's Man Booker Prize Winner Paul Beatty.
Let me take you, as we like to do at Kritikme, to a warm, safe place where you can feel at home, and invite the reader in. If some of these opening sentences from novels of the American cannon feel like easy-listening to you, then that's just the point.
'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. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.' Mark Twain. (1884)
'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.' F. Scott Fitzgerald. (1925)
'Elmer Gantry was drunk.' Sinclair Lewis. (1926)
'In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.' Ernest Hemingway. (1929)
'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.' JD Salinger. (1951)
'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.' Jack Kerouac. (1957)
'It was love at first sight.' Joseph Heller. (1961)
'If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.' Saul Bellow (1964)
'All this happened, more or less.' Kurt Vonnegut. (1969)
'You better not never tell nobody but God.' Alice Walker. (1982)
'The first thing I remember is being under something.' Charles Bukowski. (1982)
'It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.' Paul Auster. (1985)
'Some real things have happened lately.' Joan Didion. (1996)
'He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.' Don DeLillo. (1997)
'It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.' Jennifer Egan. (2011)
'I suppose that's exactly the problem - I wasn't raised to know any better.' Paul Beatty. (2015)
And if it looks to you like yet again this list is mostly men, then that's because hitherto men had time to write where women didn't. Kritikme is changing that. Most of the Kritikme novelists at work are women. Probably because Kritikme teaches you how to write a novel now, not one day when everything's perfect. Because that day won't come. So the method is how to make your busy life work for your writing. You'll need an hour a day and a hell of a busy life, because as many full time writers know, the pressure and lack of time helps. Not to mention a great emotional attachment to your novel, which is something I get you to find and tune into daily with Kritikme. That's why it's so popular with women writers. It's disruption if you like, a big push back against the old days and the old ways, and an effective/kickass way of getting our stories down.
And my own first novel's opening sentence? (From 'Becoming Strangers' written in 2001 in America...)
'Before he'd had cancer he'd been bored with life.'
My own favourite first lines?
'I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.' Dostoyevsky. Notes From Underground. (1864)
'Of course I have not always been a drunkard.' Hans Fallada. The Drinker. (1950)
And, above all else, a line that can never be repeated sadly, because he owns it; Ford Madox Ford 'The Good Soldier' (1915) :
'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.'
So come on, what's your own opening line or your best beloved line of all time? Share below!
