Hook, Line & Sinker: Fine-Tuning the First Sentence

Last year, I wrote a blog post inspired by one of my favorite essays by Stephen King, “Great Hookers I Have Known,” from his collection Secret Windows. The title of the essay is, of course, not what it sounds like. It’s about crafting a first sentence for a novel (or short story) that grabs the reader, the “hooker,” as it was apparently called by publishers back in the day.

In the blog post from last year, I looked at the “hookers” in six of my published stories and tried to ascertain if a go...