How can I write an attention-grabbing first line?

Question

So, the beginning of any story needs to capture the attention of the reader, so he continues and wants to find out what's happening.

A Confederacy of Dunces starts "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head." and gives you just enough to visualize the character yet so little to make you want to continue to read.

What techniques are there to come up with a line to simply capture a reader's interest?

Answer 1

My experience has been lack of context and mystery most quickly grab my attention. I believe this has to do with the need of the human mind to create order and solve problems. Perhaps examples will illustrate this.

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

Cold April day, northern hemisphere... clocks striking... what?

"They shoot the white girl first."

Shooting girls? Because of their race? Or is it incidental? Where is this? What is happening?

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

The sink? Writing? How? Why? WTF is going on here?

And so forth. YMMV.

Answer 2

First lines, like character names, are hard. Don't let them keep you from writing your story. In fact you may find that you write a better first line by writing your story first. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence opens with a scene that is in many ways a microcosm of the whole novel. It begins:

On a January evening of the early seventies Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

The interesting thing is that Christine Nilsson goes on to become completely unimportant in the work. The setting of the opera, however, is absolutely critical to showing Wharton's "old New York" as it was. The opening line does encapsulate some interesting things - Faust and connotations of adultery, the upper crust lifestyle of opera attendees in the late 19th century, etc.

So one good way to write a great opening line is to write your story and then write a line that sets the stage for your entire story by setting up a scene that shows your story in miniature.

Answer 3

Here, use this: "Call me Ishmael."

Or:

"Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

I think one very important quality that a good opening sentence has to have is that it is musical (not sing-songy). If you don't know what I mean, then you should forget my comment. To me, the best writers are aware of the rhythm and flow of their sentences, and will reject one if it feels awkward, ungainly, too this or too that to flow effortlessly.

For that, tho, you need to have a well developed ear. I'm not sure how to get one of those, to be honest. Some people I've tried to explain this concept to see unable to grok.

Maybe it's like Kurt Vonnegut's comment about Billy Pilgrim's huge penis: "You never know who's going to get one."

Answer 4

One thing is just to jump right into the action, e.g. "Babjack pulled to the curb and cut the engine." The master of this form was "Richard Stark" (Donald Westlake), whose novels always started with lines like "When the phone rang Parker was in the garage, killing a man."

I think the emphasis on first lines is a little exaggerated. Most readers will read more than one line. On the other hand, a good first line can set the tone for the rest of the story.

Answer 5

A good opening line gets the reader hooked and eager to read the next line. Great opening lines do that while giving the reader important information not just about the opening scene, but the entire story. Aside from the title, this is your first chance to tell your reader what your story is going to be. So you have to play fair. You can have a fantastic, intriguing opening line - like the aforementioned "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink," but you have to follow through on that. The fact at the narrator is writing while sitting in the kitchen sink has to mean something. Even if the only reason the character is sitting in the kitchen sink is because the floor isn't finished and there are not chairs, that has to mean something. . If the fact that the narrator is sitting in the sink and writing has no bearing on the rest of the story, then your first sentence is false advertising. So no dreams, TV shows, or any other fantasy (in relation to the "reality" of your story) content as the beginning of your story unless it has a clear link to and impact on what comes afterwards.

One of my favorite openings lines is "What's Papa gonna do with that axe?" the kickoff to E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. White wastes no time on anything that might bore his readers, like explaining who Fern is and where she lives or having Fern and her mother say good morning to each other and exchange small talk. He goes right for the story. It's a question, which automatically sets up for an answer, and it's dialogue, which suggests at least two people in the scene with minimal effort on the writer's part. We don't actually know who is speaking yet, but we can make the educated guess that it's someone young, judging by the reference to "Papa" and the relatively informal English. The mention of an axe suggests the possibility of violence, but still retains some mystery because axes can be used for completely nonviolent tasks. (This wouldn't be a very good opening line if Fern's father was just going to cut down a tree and cutting down trees had little or nothing to do with the story. If the axe had been a knife or a guillotine, there would have been less mystery and less reason for Fern to ask about it.) And the problem set up in this first line is the central problem of the whole book: the threat to the life of Wilbur the pig. That axe is going to hang over our protagonist's head metaphorically for most of the book.

Answer 6

I find the best opening lines to involve either very strong imagery (as your example above,) or some sense of anticipation - something important is about to happen, or perhaps already has happened and we're dumped immediately into the after-effects.

Answer 7

For me, the "opening line" usually only presents itself after I've been writing at something a while. For a short story I might "discover" the opening line once I become brave with my editing-- I go back a day or two later and see that what I thought was an opener is not...really. the real opening line is revealed a few sentences in, or even a paragraph or two. After you've written a bit, try going back to where you started and covering up the first few sentences to see if you can identify or "hear" the REAL opening line. Hint: it's usually a place where you yank your reader suddenly into the story.