Opening Lines
There is no better way to get the reader hooked than a strong opening. The first paragraph, or even better, that very first line of a book can make a statement like nothing else, pulling the reader in with a compelling promise.
One of my favorite opening lines is from Paul Theroux’s memoir of friendship with V.S. Naipaul, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”: It is a good thing that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness. Superbly evocative, this opening sets the tone for the entire book. When you first read, you are struck by its sheer lyricality and sense of pathos. When you finish the book and return to that first line, it makes perfect sense, adding substance to atmosphere.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smartest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. This is John Irving’s opening, in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” When I read this, I couldn’t help but wonder how on earth Irving came up with this opening. He must have taken the rest of the day off to celebrate!
From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester’s Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down. Stephen King opens his “Under the Dome” with this fairly harmless sentence—just another beautiful day in Chester’s Mill. But two things make this opening special for me. One, as a long-time Stephen King reader, I just know that the shit will hit the fan before long, which makes the opening deliciously ominous. And two, just notice that turn of phrase, “like something freshly made and just set down.” Such delightful imagery with a few simple words. That’s just devilishly good writing.
Of course not all books have openings this striking. I was just thinking of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and “Freedom”, and neither of them has a remarkable opening. I wonder if these established authors obsess about openings like the newbies. What strikes me about these openings is they seems so appropriate, so not forced. It seems to me that once in a while that perfect phrase, that perfect line, that perfect sentence just sort of happens to come by and you just have to be alert enough to grab it and write it down.
Then again, it seems to happen to John Irving more often than to most other writers. Here’s the first line from “The Fourth Hand”: Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event—the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.
