So
you've just spent weeks, maybe months or years, coming up with a brilliant
storyline, unforgettable characters and profound, life-altering themes
involving love or death or loyalty or faith or intergalactic
dry humping or whatever. A little voice in your head has started to whisper
that there's only so much more you can do with this thing in theory. You've
ignored it for a while, thinking not
quite yet. I still have to figure out the motivation of that second cousin's
dog walker's gynecologist. The voice becomes more insistent. Perhaps a deadline
that seemed laughably distant a few months ago is now looming over you like Boris
Karloff in his Frankenstein shoes.
The
moment of truth has arrived.
You
sit down at your computer. Yes, you can feel it. This will be the best book you
have ever written. The best book that ever
has been written in all of human history. You watch that little cursor
blinking against a field of unbroken white. Blink. Blink. Blink. It's
mesmerizing, really. And a funny thing happens. The white starts to grow until
it's the size of the Siberian tundra. Your fingers, resting lightly on the
keyboard, start to sweat. You will them to move. To type something. Anything.
After
about five minutes of this, you realize it's intolerable that your spice rack
is not properly alphabetized and decide to rectify the situation immediately.
Plus the cobwebs in that dark corner of the basement that you haven't visited
since the Clinton administration? Again: intolerable.
And so
it goes until you muster the courage to sit back down and just get over
yourself. Because it's not really writer's block (no, you can look forward to
that happening at some point later down the line). It's plain cold feet.
So what
makes a great first line? There are probably as many answers to that as there
are readers of fiction. The only common denominator is that you must keep going. Personally, I like
funny and/or kind of scary. Here's one with elements of both:
"The
gunman is useless. I know it. He knows it. The whole bank knows it. Even my
best mate, Marvin, knows it, and he's more useless than the gunman. The worst
part about the whole thing is that Marv's car is standing outside in a
fifteen-minute parking zone. We're all facedown on the floor, and the car's
only got a few minutes left on it."
That's
from I Am the Messenger by Markus
Zusak.
Or
this dead simple but shivery opener from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book:
"There
was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife."
Great
first lines sometimes start at the end of the story and work backwards, like
this one from Steve Toltz's A Fraction of
the Whole:
"You
never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good
reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are
unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the
philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his
tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange
prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having
anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred
temple, is the boredom."
Some
tell you right up front what you're in for, no beating around the bush:
“It is
a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be
in want of more brains.”
Bingo!
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Or they
take you to far-off lands you never expected to visit:
"The
place generally referred to as Hell but also known variously as Hades, the
Kingdom of Fire, Old Nick's Place, and assorted other names designed to
indicate that this is not somewhere in which you might want to spend eternity,
let alone a short vacation, was in a state of turmoil."
John
(love him SO much) Connolly, The
Infernals.
The
first book I wrote (which didn't sell) was a middle-grade/YA fantasy about a
girl math prodigy who gets sucked into a parallel world populated by obsolete
deities and assorted mythological beasties. The original opening line: "The
demigod Thoth was having a lousy day."
My agent had lots of very good suggestions for the redraft, and one of them was
that I get rid of that line because it wasn't scary enough. So I cut it,
despite howls of outrage from one of my favorite beta readers who still, years
later, berates me for caving in because she loved that line harder than any
other line in the entire book. I did too, actually, and intend to reinstate it
if we ever try to sell the manuscript again (I hope you're not reading this, Jeff, because I plan to slip it back in
without telling you).
Moving
on. I'm compelled to round this out with Oscar Wilde, even though it's not an
opening line, but just because. Oscar Wilde. You know.
Ready?
"One
must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without
laughing."
