FAMOUS FIRST WORDS

READING: Hot Shot by Suzanne Brockmann

WATCHING: Outrageous Fortune - yay, it's back!

LISTENING TO: French Kiss sound-track

MAKING ME SMILE: Having a week at home to write!

Today is a salute to that most difficult skills of all; writing the opening words of a novel. They should be pithy. Piquant. Vivid. Thoughtful or thought-provoking. Funny is good too. The first sentence needs to catch the imagination, arrest the attention of the most casual of glances. At its finest, it should provide a glimpse of the central theme and set the tone whilst enticing readers not only to continue to the end of the first paragraph but to also have fingers half-way to turning the first page.

It’s a big ask from a few words and yet we have scores of fine examples which do achieve all that and more.

Some opening lines have gone down in the Literary Hall of Quotes and it is fitting to begin this tribute with the Goddess of Romance writing, Jane Austen. Come on, all together now:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Not to be outdone, Dickens later gave us: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Another classic comes from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The giants of literature aren’t the only ones to have inspired openings. One of my personal favourites couldn’t be simpler: I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

With those words I became an instant fan of Bill Bryson and continue to be a groupie to this day.

I also have a fondness for the somewhat thoughtful The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. (L.P. Hartley The Go-Between). I read this book as a teenager and it was the first time I became aware of the unreliable narrator and was fascinated to see the story unfold on two levels.

William Gibson’s first sentence to Neuromancer sends a tingle down the spine. I wish I’d written it!

The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.

Some first sentences provoke curiosity in the most disengaged reader.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

'Why?' we ask. But Dodie Smith doesn’t immediately answer the question in I Capture a Castle. She plays with us just a little more...

That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with ours dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my best poems while sitting on the hen-house.

The narrator is already vividly alive, the setting strongly drawn in a few lines.

Nick Hornby’s first sentence of How To Be Good drags the reader rapidly into the next three sentences:

I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him any more. David isn’t even in the car park with me. He’s at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called to remind him that he should write a note for Molly’s class teacher. The other bit just sort of ...slips out.

The theme is there and so is a sense of voice.

Then there is the genius of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Setting, character, motivation and style all economically and vividly portrayed.

Ronald Hugh Morrieson memorably set the rollicking tone of his The Scarecrow; a half-comedic half-gothic tale of murder and mayhem in small town New Zealand with:

The same week our chooks were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.

Did J.K. have a shiver of presentiment of the phenomenon she was about to spawn when she penned the now historic words:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

I could go on and on. Writing this blog gave me a happy excuse to sit amongst my books, dabbling first into this one, then into that. The only problem was that so many opening sentences enticed that I found myself being irresistibly drawn back into story after story. Opening lines indeed doing their intended job.

If anyone out there has some more gems to share, I’d love to hear them.