Opening Lines

A great opening line for a novel or any story is hard to come by and now that I have four longer pieces of fiction out there I felt the urge to review them quickly.

So here they are:

Dark Matters:

“I deliberately kept it pitch dark at night so that I didn’t have to see my cursed cell at least for a few hours.”

Hm… too long but a tiny bit catchy, since the reader hopefully wonders why the speaker is in what he calls a cell and why he doesn’t want to see it. It already hints at that he has spent quite some time in that cell already.

Dome Child:

“Grand Priest Shavendra lay on a divan in his private chambers of the Mukol temple, sipped from his rice wine and looked at the communication bracelet around his wrist.”

Yuk! Way too long. But at least it conveys that we are in a weird place we’ve never heard of before (Mukol Temple) and that we might be in the future due to the “communication bracelet”.

Now, actually this prologue was formerly the second chapter, but I decided to pull it up front to introduce the antagonist and a bit of a mystery with his weird conversation partner Merjen.

So the original opening line of the Dome Child was this:

“Jove Hendricks looked into his chew-chip pouch and a stab of cold fear shot through his stomach.”

Well, a bit too long, but first of all we have something weird here, what the hell are chew-chips, which arouses interest and second we have an emotion here, cold fear, so why would Jove be afraid when he looks into his chew-chip pouch? Not a bad opening, if a bit too long.

She Should Have Called Him Siegfried:

“Never before had Hagen Patterson allowed a potion client to see his cellar.”

A bit better than the Grand Priest opening sentence of Dome Child. There is the word potion in there, which immediately indicates alchemist and we ask ourselves who the person is, whom Hagen allowed into his cellar. Not an ideal opening sentence though, since there is no emotion in the sentence.

Lord of Water:

“I needed to die like this.”

Now that’s a cool opening sentence. At least in my opinion. It’s short, catchy, and immediately opens up a horde of questions. What is happening? Who’s dying? Why does s/he need to die? Why does s/he think s/he needs to die? Why like this? What’s the method of dying?

Well, one cool opening sentence out of four – I hope my “hit-rate” will get better