By Sean Chercover
NOTE: At the end of this post, I’m giving away prizes. Yes, prizes!
At a recent lit conference, the conversation among writers in the bar turned to great opening lines. Not, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” opening lines, but opening lines of novels.
Writers love to talk about opening lines. What makes a great first sentence, what grabs the reader . . . or what is likely to make the reader close the book, put it back on the shelf and reach for another.
I’ve noticed a recent trend toward such whiz-bang first lines as:
“The bullet slammed into Joe Smith’s chest and threw him against the wall.”
“The safety line snapped and Jane Brown fell away from the rock-face and plunged toward the canyon floor.”
“Just as the man entered the bank, his head exploded.”
Okay, I made those up. But I’ve seen many that are just as bad. Full of action and danger, but ultimately boring as hell. I don’t care about Joe Smith or Jane Brown or the man with the exploding head. I haven’t even met them yet.
Here are some great first lines, pulled from the nearest bookshelf:
“Nothing is so sad as an empty amusement park.” - Soul Patch, by Reed Farrel Coleman.
“What do you do with an old madam when she’s peddled her last pound of flesh?” - Retro, by Loren Estleman
“Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.” - Drive, by James Sallis
“It surprised him, how light she was.” - In This Rain, by S.J. Rozan
“When I was a kid, my favorite book was Horton Hears A Who, and, like most kids, I wanted to hear it over and over and over again.” - No Good Deeds, by Laura Lippman
“Gold was up 2 percent the morning that Benjamin Raab’s life began to fall apart.” - The Blue Zone, by Andrew Gross
“Calderon figured that, on this night, he had to be the only chauffeur at Los Angeles International Airport who was picking up a dying boy.” - Stigma, by Philip Hawley, Jr.
“It’s hard to get lost when you’re coming home from work.” - Blonde Faith, by Walter Mosley
And finally, one that always gets me, no matter how many times I've read it:
“Because Lydia didn’t have arms or legs, she shelled out three thousand bucks to a washed up middleweight named Cap to give her ex-husband the beating of his life.” - Psychosomantic, by Anthony Neil Smith
These are all fantastic opening lines, I think, because they are written in a distinctive and authentic voice. And nothing hooks me as strongly as voice. These lines convey a mood, but more than that, they convey an attitude, they hint at a world-view. And they make me want to know more about the characters.
The bad examples I wrote above are written without any distinctive voice. They convey no distinctive attitude, and they fail to breathe life into the characters. They seem gimmicky, a cheap (and even a little desperate) attempt to try and grab the reader by the collar. The only mood they covey is, “Look Out!”
And a distinctive voice does more than just hook me. It also assures me that I’m in good hands, that the writer is confident in his or her ability to take me into a fictional world for a few hundred pages and keep me there. That the characters I’m going to meet along the way will be fleshed out and three dimensional.
So what do you look for in an opening line? Does voice matter to you, or do you want to get straight to the action?
Share with us, some of your favorite opening lines. Not the one's you're writing (we already did that post) but from books already published.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
BONUS: The first person who posts the opening line from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, wins a prize. I don’t have my copy handy, and I don’t want to misquote it. I’m not telling what the prize is, but you’ll like it. And another prize to the person who posts the best opening line (other than Crumley’s), as determined by, well, me.
Showing posts with label opening lines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opening lines. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Monday, April 30, 2007
Great Beginnings
By Michael Allen Dymmoch
I'm really great at starting things, not so good at finishing. I have a huge file in my computer--Great Beginnings--full of things like the following: "Sometimes, when the facts of an untimely death are not in dispute, the line drawn between accident and murder is just the locus of intent." That came to me while I was driving, and it sounded like the first or last line of a story. So I wrote it down--something I try to do whenever I get an idea that sounds like it belongs in a story. Thinking about that line, I came up with the probable genesis--trigonometry class a zillion years ago, where I was required to memorize definitions like: "A circle is a locus of points equidistant from a point." Trigonometry was a clue--the story had to do with math or a math geek, and a crime.
It took six years to work out the rest of the tale and come up with an ending: "When your locus is equidistant from two points, what you have is the straight line dividing them. And you always have to be careful that you come down on the right side of that line."
Here are some other "great" beginnings I'm still working on:
3/1/2001:
Any day the water wasn't frozen, Rhoda washed her hair.
Our savior was a suicidal bitch known as Cara who we had to take turns watching to see she didn't off herself.
I came late to crime--might have missed it altogether but I was pushed into it
12/31/1993:
The first thing I noticed was that the guy was naked; the second was that he was dead. Not soul-dead like my ex-brother in law, or brain-dead like my senile uncle. But white as dry-wall mud and frozen into a pose that would otherwise be quite painful. I’d seen stiffs before. I guess the naked bothered me more.
6/24/86
We all want heroes. Even those of us who know better want heroes
When I first met him I thought him dazzling, but in certain lights glass glitters as brilliantly as diamonds.
4/1/86
When you get shot with a real bullet it's never that neat process you see on TV that leaves you with a small hole through some part of your anatomy not essential for locomotion or circulation. Bullets usually hit something messy and essential—like an artery, or something painful—like your gut. When a bullet hits you in the middle, it doesn't just breeze through, because your innards aren't neatly coiled like a new garden hose They come gathered together like a dust ruffle, and when a bullet plows through, it tends to cut your ruffle into lace. I found that out the hard way.
10/18/82 These thing really happened:
10/18/1982
As I've worked it out, there are two schools of thought about disposing of dead bodies. One holds that if you hide the corpse well enough, you're out of the woods. The other is that murder always will out, so you save yourself an eternity of uneasy moments if you just dump the remains in a conspicuous spot. Unobtrusively, of course. The murderer of “X” was clearly of the second school.
9/9/1972
It was inevitable that someone would call the police. however tolerant people may think themselves, most find a man wandering the streets with a butcher knife somewhat bizarre.
I'm really great at starting things, not so good at finishing. I have a huge file in my computer--Great Beginnings--full of things like the following: "Sometimes, when the facts of an untimely death are not in dispute, the line drawn between accident and murder is just the locus of intent." That came to me while I was driving, and it sounded like the first or last line of a story. So I wrote it down--something I try to do whenever I get an idea that sounds like it belongs in a story. Thinking about that line, I came up with the probable genesis--trigonometry class a zillion years ago, where I was required to memorize definitions like: "A circle is a locus of points equidistant from a point." Trigonometry was a clue--the story had to do with math or a math geek, and a crime.
It took six years to work out the rest of the tale and come up with an ending: "When your locus is equidistant from two points, what you have is the straight line dividing them. And you always have to be careful that you come down on the right side of that line."
Here are some other "great" beginnings I'm still working on:
3/1/2001:
Any day the water wasn't frozen, Rhoda washed her hair.
Our savior was a suicidal bitch known as Cara who we had to take turns watching to see she didn't off herself.
I came late to crime--might have missed it altogether but I was pushed into it
12/31/1993:
The first thing I noticed was that the guy was naked; the second was that he was dead. Not soul-dead like my ex-brother in law, or brain-dead like my senile uncle. But white as dry-wall mud and frozen into a pose that would otherwise be quite painful. I’d seen stiffs before. I guess the naked bothered me more.
6/24/86
We all want heroes. Even those of us who know better want heroes
When I first met him I thought him dazzling, but in certain lights glass glitters as brilliantly as diamonds.
4/1/86
When you get shot with a real bullet it's never that neat process you see on TV that leaves you with a small hole through some part of your anatomy not essential for locomotion or circulation. Bullets usually hit something messy and essential—like an artery, or something painful—like your gut. When a bullet hits you in the middle, it doesn't just breeze through, because your innards aren't neatly coiled like a new garden hose They come gathered together like a dust ruffle, and when a bullet plows through, it tends to cut your ruffle into lace. I found that out the hard way.
10/18/82 These thing really happened:
10/18/1982
As I've worked it out, there are two schools of thought about disposing of dead bodies. One holds that if you hide the corpse well enough, you're out of the woods. The other is that murder always will out, so you save yourself an eternity of uneasy moments if you just dump the remains in a conspicuous spot. Unobtrusively, of course. The murderer of “X” was clearly of the second school.
9/9/1972
It was inevitable that someone would call the police. however tolerant people may think themselves, most find a man wandering the streets with a butcher knife somewhat bizarre.
© Michael Allen Dymmoch
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
