Writing That Killer First Line
By Madonna Dries Christensen
It was a dark and stormy night . . . . Who among us hasn’t heard or read that line? But do you know where it originated? It wasn’t cartoonist Charles Schulz, who portrayed Snoopy hunched over the typewriter, taking yet another stab at writing a bestseller. It’s part of the first line of Edward Bulwar-Lytton’s 1830 novel, Paul Clifford. It continues: . . . . the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against darkness.
Today, an annual contest celebrates that line as the worst example of an extreme writing style. See details at www.bulwer-lytton.com.
Writers are taught that the first page of a book must make an impact or readers might go no further. Let’s hope readers are more forgiving than that, but it is true that attention must be paid to opening lines.
I’m not sure how much further I’d have read after stumbling through this first sentence from Raymond Federman’s Double Or Nothing.
-- Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and
at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
Gasp; I’m coming up for a breath.
Among famous first lines in literature we have, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the opening of A Tale Of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. Here are more opening lines from well-known novels. Do you recognize any of them? The answers are at the end of this page.
–– The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
–– In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
–– You better not never tell nobody but God.
–– It was a pleasure to burn.
–– Mother died today. Or was it yesterday?
–– I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was different.
–– Call me Ishmael.
-- On they went, singing Eternal Memory; and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
-- When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
There’s a magazine, The First Line, which prompts creativity by giving the opening sentence for stories in each issue. Upcoming lines, with respective deadlines of August 1 and November 1, are: “Three thousand habitable planets in the known universe, and I’m stuck on the only one without (fill in the blank). And, “Until I stumbled across an article about him in the paper, I never realized how much Walter Dodge and I are alike.”
Stories can be any genre, but the first line must not be altered. If you feel up to the challenge, read the guidelines at www.thefirstline.com and then get busy. And take a careful look at all your first lines to see how they hold up.
[Answers to the first lines above: The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane; The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers; The Color Purple, Alice Walker; Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury; The Stranger, Albert Camus; Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton; Moby Dick, Herman Melville; Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak; To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee.]