It’s like that first blast of a party when the door opens and you make your way in: Does that first glimpse make you want to turn around and leave, or are you tugged forward, wanting and needing to explore, get a walk around, meet people and hear their stories? The first line of a novel tickles our fancy – or it doesn’t. A truly great first line grants a book a kind of immortality, yet has it become harder in an era of “Blink” attention spans for contemporary authors to produce great first lines?
I don’t think so. I think a lot of great first lines are happening all the time – it helps, of course, to be conversant with great lines of the past in order to reference them or build on them.
One of the all-time great openers in American literature has to be Ralph Ellison’s “I am an invisible man.” A five-word sentence loaded with explosive impact, followed by the famous “ectoplasm” riff.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer made numerous best-books-of-the-year lists, and deservedly so, opens his book: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” It’s a great opening and one that evokes Ellison, adding another layer of enjoyment.
John McMurtrie livens up the San Francisco Chronicle book section with a regular feature, A selection of first sentences from new books.
Countless books have tried to match the grumpy-adolescent tone of J.D. Salinger’s: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
If anyone has read any great opening lines of newish books that start with the word “it,” I’d love to hear them. I can’t prove it, of course, but I have a sense that great opening lines starting with the word “It” have gone out of fashion for whatever reason. Yet “it” might have produced more great opening lines than any other word.
Consider:
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
This is not meant as a list or ranking: Once I start, I could go on and on. But for any writer staring at the blank page or screen, the question of what makes a great opening line has to be faced again and again, and fresh inspiration can turn up at the most surprising times. It’s worth poking around in the realm of the great to hope sparks of genius might rub off.
What are some of your favorite opening lines from contemporary fiction? Or if you prefer, share your favorite opening lines of any novel ever.
Or even better, since many of you who read this blog are writers yourselves, just for fun let’s have a contest: Submit an opening line of your own for a possible novel – just type it below in the comments and I’ll pick a winner for inclusion in next week’s blog: Winner gets an autographed copy of A Book of Walks by Bruce Bochy or Kiss the Sky by Dusty Baker (their choice).
– Steve Kettmann
Want to receive Steve’s blog on writers and writing every week by email? Sign up below.