The First Line
Some Ideas for Writing the First Line.
If the agent of change in the novel is a person and you’re telling the story as an outside observer.
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald.
“Elmer Gantry was drunk.” Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis.
“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” On The Road, Jack Kerouac.
If the agent of change is the narrator.
“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.
“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.” The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger.
“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” Herzog, Saul Bellow.
“All this happened, more or less.” Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut.
“The first thing I remember is being under something.” Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski.
“I suppose that’s exactly the problem - I wasn’t raised to know any better.” The Sell-Out, Paul Beatty.
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.” Notes From Underground, Dostoyevsky.
“Of course I have not always been a drunkard.” The Drinker, Hans Fallada.
“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.” The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham.
“First the colours. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try.” The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez.
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith.
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.
And, above all else, a line that can never be repeated sadly, because he owns it; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier...
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
If we have a 'situation' and a cast set-piece.
“It was love at first sight.” Catch-22, Joseph Heller.
“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.” A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.
If it’s a big picture, allegorical, historical situation - then pique curiosity in res media.
“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.” City of Glass, Paul Auster.
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.” Underworld, Don DeLillo.
“It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.” A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan.
“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.” The Tin Drum, Günter Grass.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka.
For big thematic, allegorical works in res media works beautifully, i.e drop-in to the action. The understatement cuts like a knife.
“The amber light came on.” Blindness, Jose Saramago.
A warning note as to what’s to come is a treat:
“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.” 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.
For world-building speculative, fantasy, sci-fi - go oddball.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984, George Orwell.
If in doubt, relax for now.
You’ll only crack it for sure and make a decision on it at the end of the novel writing process.
“Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.” Elmore Leonard.
Try a short opening sentence for plaudits.
Call me Ishmael.
The old man was dreaming about the lions.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
All this happened, more or less.
I am an invisible man.
A screaming comes across the sky.
It was a pleasure to burn.
The reader enters the world you’ve created without delay. They’re in it - fast. Boom.
Gabriel García Márquez said that he used to spend months trying to get the first sentence right, but when he did, the rest of the book fell into place.
You won’t know how to start it just right until you’ve worked through the hook (your one-line premise for your story) and your synopsis a few times and eyeballed your theme - all of this may well happen in second draft or beyond. I didn't crack mine for my first novel until the end of the second draft. It conformed to this model, I suppose, in retrospect.
A situation of moral emergency in which the dilemma is exposed.
The first sentence establishes the principal dilemma. If you’re being cute, you will cut to the heart of the matter and also infer - this is going to change. (We know this as smart readers, since it’s the first line!)
“For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” Disgrace, JM Coetzee.
My first novel’s opening sentence? (From Becoming Strangers.)
“Before he had cancer he’d been bored with life.”
The review of my first novel's first sentence in The Guardian was:
The opening lines of Louise Dean's quite exceptional first novel may not be much of a laugh, but they stopped this reader in her tracks. It rarely takes me more than a page or two to sense whether a novel's going to take me somewhere worth going. In Dean's case, those first 17 words were enough. My heart raced and I sat up. I knew.
It's not just the bald, frank darkness of those two opening statements, nor the ache of truth they contain. And it's not just about the rise-and-fall rhythm of the words either, the pleasing arc that the collision of the two sentences somehow creates. No, most of all, I think, it's what the writer makes you feel - instantly - about this mystery "he": a wave of naked curiosity. Who on earth is this man, whose life has been so vivified by death?
