shalanna

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jaylake, Paul Jessup on opening sentences .

Finally! Some validation for my point of view about this. Critics are always picking at my opening sentences when they're the "widescreen panoramic opening" that then focuses in on a character. Or they carp that the connection to the theme(s) of the book isn't immediately obvious from the first few events in the book. Feh!

To quote:

A first sentence should make a true statement (in the nature of the work). This statement should be something odd, something different from what we experience. It should make the reader wonder why this statement is true, how it came to be true, and beg them to read on.

It should lead nicely into the rest of the paragraph, this paragraph building on this statement but never giving the actual meaning just yet. Instead it should taunt the reader.

[...] A first sentence should be the last sentence of another great book that is hiding between the pages of the book you are currently writing.

*applause* Yes! Now, THIS is the kind of thing I was taught back in school by the book-loving teachers and bookgroup leaders and friends. THIS is not the voice of workshop-brainwashed critique partners talking.

Who is this guy? Is this guy married? Will he marry me? Oh, right, I'm taken* . . . never mind, though, I can admire from afar.

*And homely besides!!

EXERCISE: What's your favorite opening sentence? Of yours? Of someone else's?

Mine: I stubbornly still like

All the Underwoods have guardian angels.

and

My life is filled with little rituals.

This one (still mine) hasn't taken quite as much heat as those two:

By the time Camille MacTavish stepped off the bus in Texas, she was beginning to regret stealing the dragon.

Theirs:

There are rules and rites and rituals older than the sound of bells and snow on mountains.
--James Thurber, THE THIRTEEN CLOCKS

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
--George Orwell, 1984

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
--C. S. Lewis, THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
--Leo Tolstoy, ANNA KARENINA (translated, though)

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 (Oh, shut up. It was written in 1813!)

Like to see some of y'all's openings. You retain all copyright and rights to your own posts and comments.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rezendi.livejournal.com

My two favourites:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelio Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
- Iain Banks, THE CROW ROAD

I too think the fetishization of opening lines, the notion that they must encapsulate the theme and/or be hideously symbolic and meaningful, is completely silly. (And note that neither of the above do anything like that.)

That said, I don't believe in starting with panorama: I like to jump in in media res, and then pull back.

Putting my money where my mouth is, here are my three published opening lines to date (cheating a bit by including one second sentence):

"Remember, I told myself only moments before we discovered the body, this was supposed to be fun."

"The taxi arrived at exactly the wrong moment."

"The bridge is out. No: it has never been in."

Do they set the tone of the book? Maybe a little. Are they pregnant with thematic meaning? Hell no. Do they capture attention? Well, I sure hope so - because that, to me, is the idea.

From:

nycshelly.livejournal.com

My favorite opening sentence is also the entire opening paragraph of John Steakley's Armor: He drank alone.

Short and to the point.

I think there is only one "should" when it comes to first sentences, that they be effective. Or, to put it another way, a good first sentence is one that keeps most people reading.

From:

coneycat.livejournal.com

The first sentence in my work-in-progress is:

The best thing about Speak French Day was the peace and quiet.

From:

houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

Imo the purpose of the first sentence is to get people to read the second sentence, and so on. If all the sentences and all the scenes don't turn out to belong together, then the reader may not read your next book. But I don't think he needs to be able to PREDICT the whole book from the first sentence (or scene or chapter). Prediction is what the cover is for. :)

I don't see much point in rejecting any TYPE of opening, wholesale -- as long as it fits with the rest of the book, is not bait and switch. If the book is going to have a lot of fight (or sex or intrigue or exploding spaceship) scenes, one of them may as well be the opening; I probably wouldn't like the book anyway.

Of course a wide-panorama opening may be the only wide-panorama in the book, and that's okay too.

Some types are harder to do well than others. Do you have some examples of the 'workshopped' openings you don't like? (I probably wouldn't like them either.)

Cool opening sentences are great if you've got one, but a cool opening scene may be better, even if it takes a few short unremarkable sentences to get into it.

From:

houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

A couple of examples:

Call me Ishamel.

---------------

From a Gore Vidal historical:

I am blind. But I am not deaf. It is the incompletness of my misfortune [that enabled him to hear a dull speech which he proceeds to pan].

---------------

These first 3-word sentences don't tell the theme etc or do much of anything except establish POV and voice -- and make you want to read the second sentence to find what the hell is going on.

Lots of old low-brow stuff uses openings like these:

"All aboard!"

------------

"More cake?"

------------

"Look out!"

Btw I just got back to this page via your Info, and most of your favorites list are on mine too. As for "stories are lying", L.M. Montgomery's Emily grew up with that too. (Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest, etc)

From:

dennismhavens.livejournal.com

I suppose the most attention-grabbing opening sentence in _any_ of my books was in FLASH FLOOD WARNING (1984).

_Arbogast Wartwhistle_. (Yep, Italics too.)

You have to read at least a few more sentences to learn what that bizarre name is, and in general what's going in the life of the protagonist. By then, I'd hoped, readers would be in the flow of the story.

Oh. Re: the Amazon contest. Once one registers, he has 7 days to get his submission to them.

And someone else -- a mystery publisher -- has started a new contest as well. Very short on details at present, but that should change after we finish celebrating Christopher Columbus's discovery of some Caribbean island in 1492.

From:

houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

Sample, not mine:

It was a slow Sunday afternoon, the kind [Walden] loved. He stood at an open window and looked across the park. The broad, level lawn was dotted with mature trees: a Scotch pine, a pair of mighty oaks [....]

That goes on with more such description and scene setting with seven WAS/WERE's and innumberable 'hads'.

This is from Ken Follett's THE MAN FROM ST. PETERSBURG, copyright 1982. Follett's book was used as an example in a how-to by his agent in 1994: "Writing the Blockbuster Novel [....] Albert Zuckerman, dissects the commercial bestseller [....] a 63-page chapter here features four versions of Ken Follett's outline for The Man from St. Petersburg and an analysis of each."

I kind of boggled that this opening was chosen over an earlier one which began something like:

"Mr Winston Churchill to see you, sir."
"That puppy! Tell him I am not at home," said Walden.
(Churchill does show up after about a page of description and quiet dull background.)

Zuckerman explains why, after much thought, the quieter opening was chosen. I've forgotten their reasons -- perhaps to establish the (imo rather dull) characters before the plot appears.

As for predicting the theme, the Churchill opening predicted that it would involve politics, and the quieter opening shows a peaceful lifestyle about to be disturbed (by the plot and by WWI :-) The back cover talks about a character who doesn't even show up till after I got bored and stopped reading.

Hm, RILLA OF INGLESIDE, all about WWI, began with a peaceful day before they heard of Serajevo. GONE WITH THE WIND began with a view of the lifestyle before the war, and gradually worked up to it. A lot of disaster movies do that too, don't they?