First Lines

My favorite online magazine today featured the headline “One of the Best First Sentences in Modern Literature.” I didn’t read the piece because clickbait annoys me. But it did get me thinking about first sentences. I’m thinking that, while ideally you want to arouse some reader curiosity with that line, your main task as a writer is to make it to the second line.

I list my first sentences (stories, novels) below and encourage you to share thoughts and/or your own first lines.

After I moved to Illinois, my sister and I wrote to each other once a year, if that, and neither of us liked to talk long-distance.

The Lingards were not a flashy couple, but people admired and envied their marriage, the symmetry of their mutual regard, often held up as a standard against which other couples disparaged their own.

The very first time I saw her, Melinda was in midair, just below the summit of a long, winding staircase, on her way down.

I remember my mother everywhere at once, my father at the wheel.

At the age of three she creates, for the first time, a better world than this one.

When her father died he was fifty-one, and her mother fifty, and her husband fifty-four, and she was twenty-nine.

Dear Betty:

On November 6 of last year, at around 8:15 P.M., I was beaten and raped by a man named Raymond C. Moreau, Jr.

At 3:00 A.M. the phone rang and rang, extracting him like a stubborn, healthy tooth from the maw of a garish dream, a complicated one with melting scenery, shifting shapes, wheeling, screaming birds.

Mr. Lazenbee was an old, old man with watery eyes and a shriveled, bashed-in chin, so that his face sloped right back to his neck from the tip of his big purple nose.

Here is the kind of person I am.

When Jenny was twelve she hosted a birthday party for her best friend.

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense.

The first thing that happened was when her mother pulled up to let her off in front of the church, and Caro was in such a hurry to get out that she opened the passenger door too soon, before they’d gotten up next to the curb, but they were close enough so that the door edge dug into the grass, and she started to get out, but her mother said, “Wait, don’t get out yet, I have to back up,” and Caro, poised half out of the car, stared at the wide curved door hinge right in front of her, a thing she’d never seen before, as the car strained in reverse, and then something cracked with a deep unresonant twonk.

By midnight all the men were asleep.

Narrator 1:

In 1957, Betty’s mother told her that if anyone ever broke into the house when she was by herself, and she couldn’t escape, she should act insane.

Lightning sought our mother out, when she was a young girl in Brown County, Indiana.

The fat broad lumbers into class five minutes late, dragging, along with her yard-wide butt, a beat-up vinyl briefcase stuffed with old notebooks.

Because the Norfolk pine was heavy, and also because she was wearing house slippers, having not yet dressed for the day, Amy took her time getting to the raised garden.

Carla Karolak was positive she had ADHD.

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