A great first line

If you spend any time reading about writing or going to writing conferences you know that, from time to time, people like to throw out “great first lines,” which often have yet unnamed heroes discovering severed heads in their glove compartment. The problem with such lessons is that they do you no good if your book isn’t about severed heads. Anyway, I find such first sentences wheeze of desperation, they are like the bespectacled kid in seventh grade who tries too hard to be your friend (I was that kid). And I can rarely think of “great first lines,” because I don’t think that way. I give a book a chance and don’t really need to be won over in the first sentence; I am won over gradually by character and plot and so forth. But next time the conversation does trend toward first lines, I want to remember this one, from Arnold Lobel’s Fables.

A crocodile became increasingly fond of the wallpaper in his bedroom.

This sentence does more than hook me. It promises to take me somewhere I have never been.

Of course to have a first line like this you must have a story that deserves it.

 

Filed under: Miscellaneous