‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ I haven’t gotten around to reading Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory yet, but that opening line (read somewhere else) will stay with me forever.
A good opening grabs your reader and straps them in for the ride. A bad opening, on the other hand, is like meeting your partner’s parents or guardians for the first time while naked and handcuffed to a camel. That bad impression is never going to go, and you’ll be fighting a very difficult battle to win them over.
Someone recently started a Twitter thread inviting people to reply with the first line of their current work-in-progress novel.
I’ve collected together some observations I made while reading the contributions on what made some great and some not so great. I’ve written them up as much for my own reference as for anyone else’s.
It has to stand on its own
This one may seem obvious, but a number of people instead responded with the entire first paragraph of their opening chapter.
An opening sentence can’t contain everything you need for the story, of course. Otherwise the rest of the novel is pretty moot.
But if you feel your opening sentence doesn’t contain enough to make it interesting without two or three more sentences – i.e. it’s only interesting in context – then it probably needs work.
Specificity grabs attention
I think it’s evolutionary that our brains prefer specificity.
After all, our primitive ancestors who were content to just know there’s a predator ‘somewhere nearby’ were probably the ones who got eaten well before they could ancest anyone.
Or think about comedy. There’s something inherently funnier about saying ‘My main source of emotional support is a cantankerous tropical fish called Ian’ than just ‘My main source of emotional support is a goldfish’.
You’re trying to build a picture inside your reader’s head. The more specific you can be, the more vivid and impactful that picture.
Keep it focused
Of course, what’s a good rule if you don’t immediately contradict it?
More detail doesn’t automatically equate to a better opening sentence.
It’s like the icing on a cake. If you keep piling on more and more, the cake is spoiled. (And some great cakes have no icing, just like some opening sentences have no detail.)
The problem with too much detail is that it can make it difficult for the reader to figure out what’s going on. This is especially true if the details aren’t connected.
You, as the writer, may want your reader to know that this is taking place in a desert, that one of the characters in a centaur, the kingdom is beset by war and a lizard just ate the sausages off the campfire. But your reader is overwhelmed and doesn’t understand how these details fit together.
Make sure that the different parts of your sentence all align to convey one key image or detail.
Contrast grabs attention
Surprise is a great way to capture someone’s attention, unless the surprise is one of those calls from mobile companies ringing you on your mobile to try and sell you a mobile.
A great way to surprise readers in your opening sentence is through contrast. For instance, a character responding to a situation in an unusual way, e.g. Gwen was delighted to discover that she’d been robbed.
It doesn’t have to be emotions and characters that provide contrast though. You could juxtapose something serene with something calamitous; The battlefield was strewn with corpses and cherry blossom.
What’s special about it?
Several of the opening sentences people shared fell into the same trap of describing something unremarkable.
They were along the lines of ‘Arthur got up at the same time as he always did and ate the same breakfast, at the same table, caught the same bus, crossed the same road, and worked the same eight uneventful hours until it was time to come home.’
The problem with this is twofold. Firstly, I think as readers we’re constantly (and usually subconsciously) asking ‘Why do I need to know this?’ If you start by describing someone’s ordinary day, why are you beginning the story at that point?
Secondly, it clashes with the elephant on the page: there are hundreds of pages of story to follow, so at some point something unusual must happen. The ‘It was a day like any other’ opening isn’t just uninteresting, it’s fundamentally dishonest. But the information is being poorly handled, which doesn’t exactly instil confidence in your reader.
At worst, it suggests you don’t know what’s interesting and what isn’t, which doesn’t bode well for your story.
Start at the point where the status quo gets disrupted. Or at least hint that these commonplace circumstances are about to change.
It all comes down to personal taste, really
Writing is incredibly subjective, and there will always be examples of novels with openings that go against these observations.
And, to be honest, I often think people put too much stock in openings anyway. Very few readers will put a page down after the first sentence fails to satisfy, although obviously a bad opening immediately sets the tone.
This list is also far from exhaustive, but it serves as a useful guide on some common pitfalls to avoid.
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Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
