When I was still unpublished, I spent a lot of time worrying about My First Line and Hooking The Reader. If my very first line didn’t grab the reader by the throat and make them incapable of doing anything other than reading on, how would I ever break in??
This… yeah… it’s a newbie obsession and lots of well-meaning advice-givers will urge you toward “opening with a bang.” When I read stories by eager young hopefuls, every first line is a BANG. A POW. A cry of anguish in the woods, the moment after the axe sank into flesh, the hero fleeing from a bomb.
Somewhat paradoxically, from the slush-reader’s perspective, the bigger the opening, the more boring. Story after story starts with a murder, with a chase in progress, with an explosion. YAWN.
What really hooks a reader is something unusual, something peculiar, something personal. A sense of voice or character. Here, for better or for worse, are the first lines of the very first short stories I sold for the cash monies:
Deshaun Steven’s Ship Log:
Personal Log – January 1
Crunches – one and a very near half.
Push-ups – none unless counting getting off floor
Calories – lost count, but all from alcohol, so okay
The Time Mechanic:
My buddy asked me to pick up some real Prohibition moonshine for him, and I’m not a guy to turn down an opportunity to show off my time machine.
Jupiter Wrestlerama:
Two-Ton Tony had a hard body, and though Karen knew the facts of life cold and backward by the time she got her chance to push him against a wall, she’d never had anything so sweet.
There. My big first three. Deshuan Steven’s Ship Log is a special case, written in epistolary style, so I gave the full non-sentence top of the first diary entry.
I liked The Time Mechanic‘s opening sentence the moment I wrote it, at Clarion in 2013. The change I made to it after critique was to add “I’m not a guy” where it originally read “I wouldn’t turn down” because first readers pointed out I never gave the main character a gender.
Now… Jupiter Wrestlerama is a big one in my mind because I wrote it before Clarion and the last tweak I made before selling it was to swap the first two paragraphs. The story had opened :
Karen stood at the entry to C-stairwell, on her way to work, and saw Tony’s body still and crooked at the base of the stairs.
I’d started the way I thought you had to, with action, with drama, with a dead body! GASP!
But the version that sold was the version that began with Karen’s thoughts about her boyfriend. Because the version that sold opens with character, it introduces us to Karen and to Tony and their relationship, so that when Tony dies, we care… if we open with Tony’s death… well, why do we care? It’s just another dead body, like thousands splashed all over lurid pulp covers.
For completeness’ sake, here are the first lines of the three stories I have failed to sell the most:
The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery (26 rejections and counting):
It was a July afternoon in 1942, well before the widespread use of air conditioning, and heat lay over St. Louis like molten lead.
Electric Tea (24 rejections so far)
The arsonist had painted the warehouse in careful lines of fresh linseed-oil pigments, flammable as anything.
A Place to Stand On (20 rejections)
Hortensia inched along a beam fifty kilometers over the surface of Venus, her safety harness clipped to two different guide ropes.
Noir setting! Arson! Hanging over the atmosphere of Venus! Exciting stuff? Maybe? Well, it hasn’t piqued any editors… yet.
I have changed the opening to “Silver Dame” just recently before sending it out again. It now reads:
July 9, 1942. Heat lay over St. Louis like molten lead, and my only ticket home to the air-conditioned future was missing, plucked out of our time machine webbing like an ice cube from a glass.
“Electric Tea” has a new first sentence, too:
I came home in the watery dawn, exhausted from waitressing all night.
Both of these changes were to put character first, before action. I haven’t changed the opening to “A Place” … yet. I still have hopes for the wee, much-rejected thing.
Anyway, to make the whole bother as grossly general as possible:
A first sentence that introduces a character’s quirks and voice will beat the snot out of any action you could have crammed into it.
Here endeth the lesson.
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