Opening Lines

If you've ever taken a writing class, you probably have had it drilled into your head how important your opening pages are: you're supposed to grab the reader, set up your story in the most brilliant way possible and give the audience an honest sense of your voice.

Yeah, that's hard. It's not entirely surprising to me that most authors (this one included) spend the most time working on their beginnings.

I've started writing six different novel-length manuscripts so far in my writing career and have completed drafts of four of them. I thought it might be fun to go and look at the first lines of all of them.

Here are the opening lines as they now stand--in the order they were written in.

If ignoring unpleasant situations could be defined as an art form, then Sara Taober was an artist and had been one ever since she first recognized somebody as beautiful and realized that she never could be.

My father died today.

Goldenrod Moram had a first name that sounded like it belonged in the middle of a fairy tale, where she would be the dazzling princess in need of rescuing.

Rox Whitby sat on the catwalk above the school auditorium.

The class president is balding. 

The idea came to Davood the djinn on a perfectly ordinary day as he was sitting on a windowsill high above the bazaar, bored out of his mind.

Whoa, that first one is wonky! The manuscript it comes from was really just an experiment, though, to see if I could actually finish writing a novel. The novel itself wasn't good...but I finished it. And I definitely learned from it. In fact, I think I could say I learned something from every first line, last line, and all the lines in between I've ever written. Getting those lines as good as I can make them, and hopefully getting even better each time, is what keeps me going.

Any first lines from your work that you care to share? Or is there a published first line that you just love? Hit me up in the comments section!

Wanna Read the Opening Paragraphs of My Book?

Oftentimes, the advice you're given as a writer is to work on your opening more than you work on any other part of your book. This makes sense since, obviously, this is the first impression a reader will get of your work (and definitely the first impression a prospective agent or editor will get too). And if they're not hooked by page five or so, there's a good chance you've lost them.

My opening paragraphs of THE MAPMAKER AND THE GHOST have changed a bit from what I wrote in September of 2007, when I first sat down with this character on my brain. But bizarrely enough, as many drafts and revisions and titles as there were of this manuscript (see here and here), my very first sentence hasn't changed at all. And the actual setting/plot of my first scene hasn't either.

It's been an exciting week for me book news-wise, so I'd like to cap it off by sharing the first two paragraphs of THE MAPMAKER AND THE GHOST. It'll be the first-ever "public" excerpt of my book. Ready?

Goldenrod Moram had a first name that sounded like it belonged in the middle of a fairy tale, where she would be the dazzling princess in need of rescuing. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. For one thing, fairy-tale princesses probably didn't get in trouble practically every day of the fifth grade. (Then again, they probably didn't talk back much either.) For another, fairy-tale princesses probably had more than one friend in the whole entire world. (And, if they didn’t, they at least had servants or courtiers or some such other fan base that could pass for friends.)

But Goldenrod had only been named Goldenrod because her mother was an avid gardener and her father had lost the coin toss on the day of her birth. Had her father won, she might have been named after one of his hobbies, which included cooking and amateur house repair. When daydreaming, Goldenrod often thought about all the other things she could have been called and how they would all have been preferable: Oregano Moram, Staple Gun Moram, Brisket Moram, Spark Plug…

There it is, world! I hope it's compelling enough to make you want to read more...in about a year.

Speaking of which, THE MAPMAKER AND THE GHOST is now on Goodreads! You can take a look/add it to your shelves/squee with me here. I've been a member/avid proponent of Goodreads since 2008 (that's like 27 years in Internet years), but I just became a Goodreads author this week (8 months in I.y.)!

Even Twitter Can't Stop the Rambler In Me

A few days ago, I noticed this trending topic on Twitter: #sixwordnovels.

I couldn't refrain from jumping on a literary TT, so I tweeted this:

Girls die out. Boys attempt survival.

I volunteer with an organization called Girls Write Now, where they pair a professional female writer as a mentor to a teen female writer from an under-served NYC school. A few hours after I tweeted the above, I was meeting with my mentee and we were talking about genre-writing. In particular, we were doing an exercise where we both tried writing a scene that could be classified as either horror or suspense.

For some reason, my six word novel was nagging at me, so I decided to go with it and flesh it out a bit. Here's what I wrote:

"They're dead. All of them." Henry spoke in a dull voice, as if he didn't even care. As if this wasn't the end of the human race.

"What should we do now?" I asked. I was sweating and the spear I held kept sliding through my grip.

"Live. I guess." Henry shrugged. "Until we die. And die out." He held his rifle confidently. He didn't look at me as we talked, choosing instead to stare out at the thrashing sea. Unlike us, it wasn't going anywhere.

"Do we tell the others?" I asked. I couldn't help it. I had no answers, and Henry always seemed to. Whether they were the correct responses, the right ones, I couldn't tell. But still, they were better than none.

"Don't see the point in lying," Henry said.

I frowned. He was probably right. But what would the other guys do once they found out that they were all gone? Every single female of the species was either drowned at the bottom of the sea or lay decaying with its sister corpses on the mass of land we had managed to escape from.

Escape. But what was the point? There was nowhere for any of us to go from here. And without the girls, nowhere for any of our kind. We were the last and the way things were going, it seemed likely we wouldn't survive each other anyhow.

I gripped my damp spear tighter.

It's probably a little too reminiscent of Lord of the Flies to ever go anywhere as is, but I had a lot of fun writing this. It's very, very different from anything I usually write and thinking about the elements of horror and suspense was a cool exercise for both of us, I think. Besides, exploring strange and new territory has always been my favorite part of writing anyhow!

P.S. Girls Write Now is a pretty great organization. Please check out their website if you're interested in learning more!