I’m on blog holiday while meeting a deadline for one of the Evil Day Jobs. Please enjoy this rerun of one of my past posts.
I’ve been thinking about opening lines the last couple of days. I cannot over stress the importance of an opening line. It’s the first thing a reader sees (well, not counting the cover or back cover blurb), so you have to make a good impression! Let’s take stock of a few memorable opening lines:
There’s the now clichéd “It was a dark and stormy night,” by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton in his novel Paul Clifford (1830), which has since spawned The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening line (very funny read, I recommend checking them out).
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” A Tale of Two Cities.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” The Gunslinger, Stephen King
“There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.” Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.” Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier.
You get the idea.
The opening to my own novel House of Cards (yeah I went singular with the title) is a pretty decent one, I thought: It isn’t every day you see a dead man running.
I read somewhere in blogdom over the summer that the opening line sells a book and the last line sells the next book (if anyone remembers where this came from, let me know so I can properly credit the author)[Editor’s note: it was Mickey Spillane]. I got to thinking about this yesterday after Shadow died because a friend of mine (whose dad used to be a mortician and funeral director) made a comment that I thought would make a fabulous opening line: It always rains when a good man dies.
I’m going to use it in something. I don’t know what yet. But look at the possibilities that go along with it! (apart from the obvious). It could be raining when they bury a bad man. It could be dry as a bone and the middle of a drought when they bury a good man. Is it raining? Is it sunny? Who died and why? Was it natural? Murder? These are all questions engendered by that one line. And that’s what makes it a hook. The reader wants those questions answered and you have a whole book in which to do it. So spend some time crafting those first lines to make sure you engage the reader from the get go.
One thought on “The Importance of Opening Lines”
I love the Narnia series. And that’s a great opener from Dawn Treader. Have a good New Year’s!