Silver's Helpful Writing Tips

First Lines to Die For?

autumn_sunfire

We all want them. That elusive blend of pith and intrigue. The fabled "hook". Is there a perfect first line? 

Hello, world! This is Verity Buchanan, and I'm honored to be one of Stephen Howard's guest bloggers! Call me Verity, Ver, or Autumn – I go by all three. In conjunction with Stephen's Getting Your Story Started worksheets (they're excellent – check 'em out!) I thought it would be helpful to delve into some of the nitty-gritty details of launching your next bestseller. 

So our topic today is the perfect opener line, and is there one? The answer is no and yes. 

No, because you will never be able to make everybody happy, and yes, because you can find an opener that will suit your story to the nail and it isn't that hard or (newsflash!) even that important. Let's start by taking a look at the first line of my own book, The Journey. 

"Sandy yawned." 

I could have begun my story any number of places. I could have begun in the head of Sandy's brother Fred, who actually carries the main bulk of The Journey's narration. I could have started with Sandy dashing along the top of a pigpen fence, as she does later in Chapter 1. But I started with Sandy, because Sandy is both the more humorous voice and the more dissatisfied one as the story commences, and I started with Sandy yawning because – well, because Sandy was at the breakfast table. And who of us hasn't yawned at the breakfast table. 

Now, when this story was on Wattpad, this first line got a lot of attention. First lines tend to, especially if you join a book club, which I did for a few months. Some people praised me for it, remarking what curiosity it provoked in them. Other people related to Sandy. Others heavily critiqued it, saying that they didn't want to read a story about someone who was bored. 

I subscribed heavily to the concept of the ideal first line at the time, so the harsh critics left a big impression on me. I mulled over altering the first line for a while. Then another reader came along, who saw the critique and disagreed directly with it. That got me pondering. 

I began to weigh in the large number of people who had liked the first line against the minority who had attacked it. Did I really want to cave to someone's personal preference over an overwhelmingly positive response? I decided, for now at least, to leave it untouched. Fast forward six months, and The Journey has been accepted for publication and is undergoing intensive editing by a professional. 

The really thorough, nit-picky, tear-your-hair-out stuff. And the first line doesn't even get a mention. 

First lines are not as important as people will tell you they are. Sure, catchy or riveting ones are fun to write and fun to quote, but which of us really pauses after the first line of a book and thinks, "Now I will decide whether or not to continue reading." ? 

Didn't think so. 

We may notice it and think "What a great opener", but it's the first few paragraphs, or the first few pages, that draw us in as a whole and get us invested in the characters. The first line can only tell so much. It's how it leads into the following portions that really makes or breaks the book. 

Now that I've disappointed you with how unimportant first lines are, let me reiterate that they're still worth taking a few pains over. Just not that many. So let's look at the options you have for your killer first line. 

Several good old stand-bys for starting a story exist. The one that's probably most popular nowadays is the action line. It drags the reader right in to what's going on, like my own example: "Sandy yawned." 

An excellent quote from Louis L'Amour is in order here: "Start every story in the middle. The reader doesn't care how it begins, he wants to get on with it." - Louis L'Amour Other openers are the scene-setter and dialogue. I've used both. 

The scene-setter is definitely not trending nowadays, because it starts out slow. Take my opening paragraphs from The War: 

"Clear and sunny was the dawn of the twelfth of April. Sunlight glinted on the needles of Thiranu's pine trees, and cascaded through empty boughs of birch, oak, aspen, and maple. Under its heat the snow-drifts of winter thinned into the air, the vapor forming trailing white shrouds amid the quiet trees of the forest. As the light hit them, they glittered like the breath of dragons and unraveled slowly into weak, wisping strands that dissipated with silent sighs." 

See how the slow, meandering sentences create a mood of serenity? That was actually quite intentional on my part – not to dull the reader's interest by any means, of course. The book title is "The War"; I was creating a calm before the storm. 

Dialogue, our third option, is always fun. You have to be careful, though, when kicking off a story with it, because a dull piece of dialogue can be perfectly useless when your readers don't know the character, and you don't want your first line to be useless! A well-chosen snippet of dialogue, though, can create instant mood and rapport. 

My four-volume project, Sorrow and Song, starts its first book off with this gem: 

"Ha' ye ever seen a man more smitten?" the innkeeper's wife tittered softly to Mrs. Earle. 

Dialogue, scene, or action. Which to pick? Try all three. Try multiple versions of a technique. More likely than not, you're not going to come up with just one opener that fits your book. You'll come up with two or three that look good. 

Then you can narrow it down by a couple qualifiers: which one will draw the reader in more? Which one showcases my main character or sets the mood best? It might come down to a simple matter of personal preference. And that's okay. 

Because in the end, your book is a whole jumble of your personal preferences. And the people who read it will come because they share those preferences with you. 

Write on, my friends. Write on.