That All-Important First Line

Several days ago a reader asked me:
I have not written fiction in nearly 20 years and can't seem to get the first line written. Do you have any advice for getting me through the first line? Writing an outline is no problem, I just can't seem to find a proper introduction. Once I'm past this wall the story will flow as it almost always does (I've spent the last decade or so writing history). Also, I am considering writing this as a narration instead of first person.

It's a really good question. The first line of a novel is like the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth: everything else follows from it.

I think pretty hard about how my novels start. Here are the first lines (or paragraphs) of some of them:

The Empire of Time (my first published novel, 1978):
The intertemporal shuttle between Earth/2015 and Beulah/1804 was an old subway train.

Icequake (1979):
Penny Constable woke up suddenly and looked at her wristwatch. The glowing orange light-emitting diodes told her it was 0503 hours, Thursday, February 7, 1985. With any luck it would be her last day in Shacktown.

Eyas (1982)
Out of darkness came dawn.

Tsunami (1983)
"Three hundred and three metres," Don Kennard said into the microphone. "I'm about two metres above the bottom. Visibility is fair."

Brother Jonathan (1985)
He hurt.
Cramps made lumps of pain in his legs. His thighs and buttocks went numb, then ached back to life. Itches crawled across his skin. His ribs and wrists and ankles were raw and chafed under the straps that held him down.

The Fall of the Republic (1987)
When his working day began at midnight, he did not yet know that he would kill a man before dawn.

Rogue Emperor (1988)
Late in the afternoon of May 22, AD 100, Gerald Pierce sat four rows up from the arena in Rome's new Flavian Amphitheater, the stadium later to be known as the Colosseum. The emperor Domitian himself was presiding as editor over the day's show. Sixty men had been killed so far, not counting the lunchtime executions of fifteen noxii, condemned criminals unworthy of a gladiator's death.

Gryphon (1989)
Alexander Macintosh, captain and soon to be proprietor of the spacecraft Wuthering Heights, felt very ill at ease with himself and his world. The drive had just cut off, and the ship was moving at three hundred kilometers per second; in his present mood it felt like three times that, a headlong acceleration to disaster. Earth glowed bright and welcoming through the skylights in his office, yet he would rather have been out past Jupiter, staring at the cold bright stars.

Henderson's Tenants (in progress)
“No way to break the news gently, Mike.” Jeremy Stein came around his desk and sank into the armchair next to Mike Henderson’s. Awkwardly, he patted Mike’s shoulder. “You’ve got advanced pancreatic cancer.”

When you look at them together, you'll notice that they tend to make unusual statements, and they tend to show someone under stress.

To find out what the heck an intertemporal shuttle is, you'll have to read more. To find out why a spacecraft captain feels anxious about going to Earth, you'll have to read more.

That's just a routine hook; you can do the same thing with a college essay or a magazine article. The first line of a novel should also describe the moment when the rest of the novel becomes inevitable. When Don Kennard is at the bottom of the sea, he has nowhere to go but up. When Mike Henderson knows he's got terminal cancer, he faces the biggest battle of his life. As readers, we recognize this—at least subconsciously—and we read to see how these characters will confront their problems.

Their stress has to be appropriate. If you're going to write a novel about a middle-aged nun's sudden crisis of faith, you can't start with a barrage of gunfire. If your hero is going to kill a man before dawn, that death is going to shape the rest of your hero's life. If your hero is time-travelling to ancient Rome, what he sees (and how he responds to it) will decide the course of the story. (Gerald Pierce, by the way, is the hero of The Empire of Time, The Fall of the Republic, and Rogue Emperor. He gets stressed a lot.)

I have often committed the cliché of starting a story at the beginning of a day, with someone waking up or going to work. Yes, it's embarrassing, but every story follows a kind of daily or seasonal cycle: from dawn to noon to sunset. Gerry Pierce is a tool of oppression; his work day begins at midnight, the bottom of the cycle. Eyas begins at dawn on the first day of a new year, and before the end of that day my hero (still a baby) will have begun his life with the Fisher family—a slightly odd family living in British Columbia ten million years from now.

Whether or not you start at the beginning of a day, you start at the moment when the story becomes inevitable. Gerry Pierce in the Colosseum is about to see something that will change his life. Penny Constable isn't going to get out of Shacktown on February 7, 1985 (my 44th birthday, by the way) because the West Antarctic ice sheet is going to collapse in a few hours. Until Mike Henderson knows he's dying, he can do anything he wants to. Once he does know, his options are few.

If you really know where you're going, the first line can sum up the whole story. That's what "Out of darkness came dawn" does in Eyas: after ten million years of suffering, humanity is one lifetime away from liberation. The pain endured by Jonathan Trumbull (a spastic quadriplegic) is going to end—not at once, but soon, and by the end of the novel nothing will hold him down.

So your novel can start in the last moments of a peaceful world, just before everything goes to hell. Or it can start in the last moments of hell's rule, when the damned begin to fight for their salvation.

If, like many writers, you're writing your novel to find out what you're trying to say, it's a good idea to leave the opening lines until the story is done. Then, knowing where you've ended up, you know where to start. If the novel ends in blowing snow, you can start it on a sunny April afternoon. If it ends with a cheerful roll in the hay under an August sun, it can start with a rape in shivery February drizzle.

As for my reader's second question, about writing in "narration" (third person) rather than first person, that's the material for another long post...and I still have a lot of grading to do, so bear with me on that one.

Comments

[Lisa Hartjes]

I have to agree with you about the importance of the opening of a novel. That first hundred, and then thousand, words are the most important - and most difficult - to write.

[Stephanie Capo]

The way you write is exquisite, your writing style and the words you chose.I believe I would go about purcasing any of those.

[Tony Scally (United Kingdom)]

What do you make of the Lulu self publishing concept?

www.lulu.com

[Paul Humphreys]

My first line:

"The Catholic priest was the only one in the room with a sun tan."

Paul

[Andreo]

You're absolutely right about the importance of the first line and how to achieve a positive effect. I will now give my first line for a story I'm writing:

De vijftiende dag van de zesde maand in het jaar 2006. Het was op die dag het begon: die waanzinnige maalstroom aan gebeurtenissen, die onverwachte wending van de geschiedenis, die het eind van de wereld zoals die gekend was inluidde - het begon allemaal op die ene zonnige namiddag. Het begon allemaal in een duister zaaltje. Het was de ontmoetingsplaats van een sekte.

This probably won't mean anything to you, since it is written in Dutch. In translation, it would be something like this:

The fifteenth day of the fifteenth month of the year 2006. It was that day is started, that insane maelstrom of events, that unexpected twist of history, which announced the end of the world as it was known - it all started during that sunny afternoon. It all started in an obscure chamber. It was the meeting place of a sect.

I wish you lots of luck with your writing.

Andy 'Andreo' Peetermans, 15 years, Flanders (Belgium).

[E.L. Green]

In my case, I was examining the problem of power as expressed in anarchist philosophy and contrasting that with reality as expressed in places like Somalia and Iraq, and ruminating upon Chairman Mao's statement that "power flows from the barrel of a gun". Which is true, to a certain extent -- the power of the State, for example, relies upon a monopoly upon major forms of violence (fail to pay your taxes or ignore the State's restrictions upon things such as traffic lights and see what I mean, the State will seize you or your property at gunpoint). Yet simplistic. Mao had one part of the equation right, but forgot about other things, such as the ability of money to buy guns, the ability of fervent support amongst the people to provide guns or deny guns, the willingness of people to use guns (the problem with anarchist theory is that it ignores the reality that most people are apalled by violence and thus removal of the government inevitably ends up with rule by sociopaths who enjoy violence), etc. The example of the American South in the late 1860's where the majority ended up re-enslaved because the minority had military training and more guns was on my mind too.

So I sat down and asked myself, "what am I going to write? What is the title of this thing?". I picked a title out of thin air. I asked myself, "who is the protagonist of this thing?". I came up with a protagonist, who, I must admit, was created primarily as a reaction to the protagonist of a neo-noir where in my opinion said neo-noir got it both right and wrong. Then I sat down and wrote: "Power grows from the barrel of a gun."

The rest went from there. We now know there's guns, there's going to be (presumably men) of power, and other things of that nature, even if in this case said gun is being held by a Barney Fife impersonator in the employ of a security company.

Just write. And BTW, the last line of chapter 1 is as important as the 1st line. If it doesn't give someone a reason to turn the page and see what happens in chapter 2, you're not going to sell.