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I've been working on a unified field theory for fiction, which is an impossible task. In every way the impossibility is clear when I take on the theory and practice of first sentences. A first sentence has so many possibilities! It's supposed to hook the reader, of course (or at least not drive the reader away), but it also can introduce one or more of the following: conflict, character, setting, background, or action. It can start the story in the middle, in media res, or it can start at the end, the beginning, or way before the beginning. In a flashback story, the first sentence could start way after the end.
For me, the first sentence has to do three things: hook the reader, set the tone, and set up the end. Here's one of my own favorite first sentences. It's from "Shark Attack: a Love Story"
"Willard was day dreaming about Elsa when the shark caught Benford, the new mail boy, directly in front of Willard's desk."
I liked this one because I got the two most important elements in the story within it: Willard's attraction to Elsa, and the problem with the sharks. It seems like a good hook to me, it went a long way toward establishing the story's tone, and it connected to the end, since the resolution of the story deals with both the sharks and Elsa.
But the problem with beginning sentences is that there's an infinite number of ways to start! Consider a story like a chess game. In chess there are 20 possible opening moves, each one affecting how the game may go. In a story, though, there are as many opening moves as there are words in the dictionary (isn't it sad, then, how many stories start with "the").
So, since there are so many ways to start, and any one of them could be the first sentence to a successful story, what should be considered when evaluating the sentence?
When I'm teaching story writing, I'll often have the students put their draft's first sentence on the board. I'll have them do two things: they have to identify what approach the sentence took (conflict, character, setting, background, or action), and then decide which sentence made them want to read more the most. All the exercise really does is make them aware that their first sentence is a choice. I'm constantly amazed by inexperienced writers' inabilty to see the malleability of their own writing. It's like they are trapped by their styles!
I end up giving students three pieces of advice about first sentences (and that's all I've got for them--there's too much involved for me to go beyond these suggestions):
- Remember that you can change your first sentence.
- Make sure that the beginning sentence sets up the end of the story in some way.
- Don't worry about the first sentence when you are writing the rough draft. Way too much agony can be generated while staring at a blank page, waiting for the perfect first sentence.
- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher." Edgar Allan Poe, "Fall of the House of Usher"
- "There were fireworks the first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments." Ray Bradbury, "The Fox and the Forest"
- "After the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach." Stephen King, "Night Surf."
- "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." George Orwell, 1984
I see that three of these sentences begin with a pronoun and a linking verb, a style I discourage in class, and, yet, there they are, in my list of good opening sentences. I guess that confirms another truism of mine, there are no unbreakable rules (if it works).
Maybe the problem with first sentences is that we put WAY too much emphasis on them. They are too small of a piece of the puzzle that is the story to make or break it. Maybe a better entry for today would have been about first paragraphs or first pages, but, well, I wrote this instead *g*.
Resources for first sentences:
Writing Fix Story Starters for Writers: Interesting First Sentences This is more of a writing exercise than advice. They randomly generate a first sentence for you.
Five Best First Sentences from 1985
100 Best First Lines from Novels
Thoughts on first sentences? How do you know you've written a good one? Does your first draft first sentence make it to the final draft? How do you evaluate your opening sentence?
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Comments
I don't think you really see tone until you have a few sentences behind you.
That doesn't negate your point, though. The first sentence is the first step in establishing tone. It doesn't necessarily complete it, though.
I need someone to blog about a surefire way to win the lottery today. That would be good timing for me. *g*
I went off to the "100 best" link and it's clear some of those have been chosen for the book, not the line (e.g. Catch-22 - "It was love at first sight" is meaningless without the context, and I'd guess it's been used as the first line of other books much less feted). But there are some interesting examples, not always the best-known ones (good to see Gibson's Neuromancer in there, for example, which is a superbly precise, admirably succinct bit of mood-setting).
Are first lines more important than titles? Do they work together? After all, when we erad the first line, we (usually) already know the title, which can also give us a certain amount of contextual information about tone and mod and setting.
The favourite first line I've written is "All Mig Shepherd's friends came to kill her on the morning of a wet Vennerday." I'm still inordinately pleased with that, and not in a florid murder-your-darlings kind of a way.
That's a fun first sentence to real aloud!
"I confess to the murder of Donald Risley," the Rougher said.
The story shouldn't go into a detailed flashback (as I've planned it) but hints at the past events over the first 200 words, where the hook really is:
"The man you killed wasn't Donald Risley. You're free to go."
The rest of the story is the after math. That first sentence only raises questions, but I'm not sure it points to character or tone or plot. Sadly I can't think of a better opening line for this story.
The real problem with any discussion of story elements is that none of them are really "elements" in any discrete way. A story LOOKS linear (it starts with a beginning and progresses in a long line of words to the end), but a story doesn't work in a linear fashion. Everything ties into and pulls on everything else. So, a first sentence could be incredible with the right set of following sentences, all of them pulling on and reacting to each other.
I like the analogy of a painting where the painter starts pulling colors from one section into another. You don't see a painting in a linear fashion; you see it as a whole thing with all the "elements" playing off of each other. Colors and shapes in one section cause you to see other colors and shapes differently. They work together and off of each other. Stories are like that too.
It's not an exact analogy, but it helps me to remember that changing a beginning sentence can ripple out to change the effect of later sentences.
Thoughts on first sentences?
My main "strongly-held" opinion about first sentences is that they should not be gimmicky, meaning, they should have *something* to do with the rest of the story, not be mere attention grabbers. Not all short sentences are suspect, but it seems most of the gimmicky ones tend to be on the short (6 words has been cited as a guilty number by another writer friend) side.
Don't throw a dead body at me just to try to hook me, in other words. And even if we are only talking about first sentences here, I'll throw out the fact that I'm not a fan of the ACTION/BANG/BOOM opening scene either. That may be, though, because I don't tend to read books in which explosions and fights play a huge role.
How do you know you've written a good one?
Hmmm, I don't think I've written many good opening sentences. I'm not productive enough to have scads to choose from, but the ones I like tend to have a "quirk" (felicity of language, unusual metaphor, etc.) or definite voice.
Does your first draft first sentence make it to the final draft?
Frequently in short stories, not in novels. But, as I said before, I'm not a prolific writer. The fact that I keep them in shorts is because I tend to start stories from a sentence, as in I get the opening line and have to write it down in order to release the rest of the story from my brain. A short is a voyage of discover for me. Not at all the same process for my novels, even though they, too, are composed largely of discovery during the first draft.
How do you evaluate your opening sentence?
Being faithful to the tone of the story that follows seems to be pretty high on my scale of what rates as good. I like stories with resonance, and a beginning that echoes and is echoed by the end pleases me greatly.
I work hard on my first lines, and I never use the one from my first draft. I'm a newish writer. I've just written one short story and one novel, neither of which is ready to be submitted anywhere. But in both cases, I ended up rewriting not only the opening line, but the entire opening scene. More than once, in fact.
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My sister was arguing with me about the "right" way to roll paint onto her dining room walls when the phone rang.
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That's from Shalanna's revision of her mystery/romance as of 2007-05-21 14:23:00.
It may not be real 'hooky', but it establishes setting and characters and relationship all at once, and leaves me tumbling off-balance to find out why the phone call is important.