How to Write a Great First Sentence and Nail Your Opening

In the process of writing a novel or memoir—or anything, really—no single sentence is more outright intimidating than the first. It isn’t easy to figure out how to write a great first sentence.

You hear it in workshops, college classrooms, writer’s conferences, and how-to books, and for that matter in blog posts like this one written by book editors like me: The first sentence needs to hook the reader. If the first sentence doesn’t engage the reader, why bother with the second? There are ...