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A great first line seduces. It lures and entices you into reading more. Bad first lines, on the other hand, are like a bad pickup line in a bar - a total turnoff. An author always hopes they've hit upon the latter and a reader always knows when they've hit the former.
Why are first lines so important? I think author Mindy Klasky said it really well in her guest blog at Bookmark.
Beginnings that call out to the reader to turn the page, to soak up one more paragraph, another chapter, an entire book at one sitting.
As someone who is rather inclined to read books in one sitting I must agree with her. Good lines draw me in, and when good first lines are followed by more good lines I know that I'm not going to get much more sleep. I've often sat in front of a computer, the cursor blinking in the first space of a blank page and wonder how on earth author so it. Author Anya Bast in a guest post at You Gotta Read Reviews answered that question for me. Authors get it done by obsessing.
I love writing that very first line of a novel. Actually, I obsess over them, rewriting them several times before I end up with the final version.
The first line is the first impression the reader gets of your work while they're standing in the bookstore deciding whether or not to buy your book. It's pretty important! It needs to hook the reader and make them want to read on. Your objective is to intrigue the reader, make them wonder what's going on and why.
From a reader's point of view first lines can let you know if a favourite author is going in a new direction from their previous works. Mrs Hill's Book blog found right from the first line that Lauren Myracle's Bliss wasn't going to be like the Myracle's previous books.
Wow! What a great departure from what Lauren Myracle typically writes (well except for RHYMES WITH WITCHES - I knew that name Lurlene was familiar!).But for the most part I think people associate Myracle's name with her wonderful tween books (Eleven, Twelve etc.) or the TTYL series.This is quite different from those. It's creepy, chilling, and has the coolest opening line. "Grandmother won't tolerate occultism..."
One of my all time favourite first lines is from Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. Random Distractions is smitten with is as well.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea cosy.
I think I first read I Capture the Castle when I was about sixteen; reading it again 45 years later, I realise that I was far too young to appreciate its wit and charm the first time around.
When I was prepping for this post I asked my fellow Contributing Editors their suggestions for great first lines. Here's just some of the great responses I received.
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drug began to take hold" - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." - Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginides
"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." - The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
"Balloon Tying for Christ" was the cheapest balloon manual I could find." - Clown Girl by Monica Drake.
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God." - A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
"Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs." - Little House
