First Lines

How important is your first sentence?

It’s important enough that Thrillerfest held a contest for best first sentence of a published novel.  I was lucky enough to be one of the winners.  My first sentence is from Random Road.

Last night Hieronymus Bosch met the rich and famous.

My agent once told me that she gets one hundred submissions from writers seeking representation every day.  A hundred submissions!

She also told me that the one thing that made her want to look at the rest of the first chapter of Random Road was the first sentence.  At the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, she was a speaker and asked me to stand up and recite the first sentence of my book to the crowd.

When I was finished, someone seated near me loudly asked if I could recite the last sentence of Random Road.  Slightly embarrassed, I couldn’t.  Frankly, I’d rewritten it so many times.  But I remembered the opening line, and so did my agent.

In a 2013 interview in the Atlantic, Stephen King said, “There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It’s tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don’t think conceptually while I work on a first draft—I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.”

Here are a few examples of some of my favorite first sentences:

I feel compelled to report that at the moment of my death, my entire life did not pass before my eyes in a flash- Sue Grafton, I is for Innocent.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen—George Orwell, 1984.

All of this happened, more or less.—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.

I sat in the back pew and watched the only woman I would ever love marry another man—Harlan Coben, Six Years.

They shoot the white girl first—Toni Morrison, Paradise.

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were place in a tub of cement—Dennis Lehane, Live by Night.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.

Three other winners from Thrillerfest’s First Sentence Contest:

Gracie Falcon was halfway over Vail Pass white-knuckling her Jeep through a late spring snowstorm when she heard through intermittent static on her car radio that she’d been killed in a plane crash.– C. Harrison

Prouty had a drinker’s face, a graveyard cough, and a heart a hangman would kill for.–Jeffrey B. Burton

San Ruben, California is a long way from Boston, whether you measure it in miles, years, or bodies.–Jack Soren

But not every first sentence is a keeper. Every year, the Bulwer-Lytton Prize, inspired by novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s famous “it was a dark and stormy night” opener, is given to an opening sentence for the “worst of all possible novels.”

Here are some of the best entries of the last decade:

As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had—Ali Kawashima.

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil—Molly Ringle

As the sun dropped below the horizon, the safari guide confirmed the approaching cape buffaloes were herbivores, which calmed everyone in the group, except for Herb, of course—Ron D. Smith

For more information about the Bulwer-Lytton Prize, go to https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/  Take a look at the 2018 Grand Prize winner.  It's a doozy!

www.thomaskiesauthor.com

A New Beginning—Times Four

Yesterday I wrote a new beginning for my work in progress.* This is the fourth beginning. I like it. Of course, I liked the three previous beginnings as well.

Beginning #1: In the middle of that cold, cold winter of 1917-1918, somewhere in the far reaches of western Kansas, Earnest Clinton received letter from the President of the United States. He had been called by his country do his bit and help defeat the Hun. So Earnest packed a change of underwear, and caught the train to Camp Funston, just outside of Junction City, Kansas, and took his place in the ranks of the U.S. Army.

I’d congratulate myself on my cleverness and merrily write on. Then, thirty or forty or one hundred pages on, I’d start to brood. Is my opening good enough?

Beginning #2: Men are sorry creatures. Oh, some are useful to have around. Loyal, protective, competent providers, like well-trained hunting dogs. But generally, men are a disputatious lot, prideful and easily roused to mischief. If a woman wants to avoid heartache, it will serve her well to stay far away from the world of men and tend to her own affairs.

I read an article by an editor who said that she gives a manuscript three pages before she decides whether or not it’s worth her time. I’ve heard this before. Conventional wisdom is that three pages all you have to capture a prospective reader.

Beginning #3: On the fine soft morning of September 1,1918, the congregation of the First Christian Church of Boynton, Oklahoma, prayed for a speedy end to the Great War in Europe. The new preacher, Mr. Huster, didn’t ask that the enemy be annihilated and crushed into dust, as did many of his flock in their private prayers, but that the better angels of human nature would prevail and peace and good will be restored between nations.

I think that if you are as popular an author as Steven King, the reader will give you the benefit of the doubt, because he knows that eventually you’re going to deliver.  But if nobody ever heard of you, you’d better be as interesting and exciting as you can as fast as you can.

Beginning #4: Wesley M. Cotton, prosecuting attorney for the District Court of Muskogee County, Oklahoma, looked up from the deposition to study the couple seated in the chairs in front of his desk. Mr. and Mrs. Shaw Tucker, currently residing on a farm located outside of Boynton, in the western part of the county.
“My wife has come into possession of some new information that we think you should hear.”
Shaw Tucker was doing the talking, but Cotton had no illusions that the reason was because Alafair Tucker was shy or demure. Ever since she had set foot in his office, Cotton was aware that she had been evaluating his every move, judging his every word. He resisted an urge to straighten his tie and adjust his waist coat. Instead he folded his hands on his desktop and leaned forward. “If that is the case, I would appreciate it if you could relate this new evidence to me in your own words, Mrs.Tucker.”
Her sharp, dark eyes gave him a final once-over. Cotton decided that he had passed inspection when she relaxed back into her chair and said, “Mr. Cotton, you have the wrong man, and I aim to tell you how I know.”

Readers used to be more patient, I think. One of my favorite books when I was young was Beau Geste, by Percival Wren, that swashbuckling tale of the French Foreign Legion.  I must have read that book half-a-dozen times.  And yet, I defy any modern to slog through the first 70 pages of set up before the action begins.

A proven technique for beginning a novel is to start in the middle of the action, off and running. The protagonist finds a body. Our hero is sitting in the middle of the road with a gunshot wound and doesn’t know how he got there. The heroine comes home from a trip to find her children are missing. Something intriguing and mysterious has happened before the reader comes in to the story, and now she desperately wants to find out what it is and how it happened.

That’s the idea, anyway.

What do you want to do with beginning? Catch the readers interest, make her wonder what is going to happen next.One may have written the most fabulous novel ever conceived of by any human being, but if you don’t get them by the first three pages, they will ever know how heartbreakingly beautiful your work is.

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*I'll probably use some variation of all these beginnings somewhere in the book. But don't bet the farm that I use any of them as the actual beginning.