Enticing a reader enough to get them to the end of a fiction book without feeling they’ve run a marathon with an anvil tied to each foot is one of the most frustrating conundrums in the business, and the one that often seals the difference between writerly fame and failure. How to hook a reader in? Does one commit the ultimate sin and create a cover worth judging? Use the blurb to feed the entire plot to the readers, in a haze of ellipsis and staccato minor sentences? Or how about a corker of a first sentence?
Excluding the cover and the blurb, the first sentence is the writer’s first chance to keep the reader exactly where they are. Naturally, there are multifarious approaches to such an important aspect of the book. Some writers favour the ‘crash-landing’ technique, the unceremonious heaping of important information into the first sentence, which often comes across as a tad clunky. Penelope Fitzgerald provides an excellent demonstration of this in At Freddie’s (1982):
It must have been 1963, because the musical of Dombey & Son was running at the Alexandra, and it must have been the autumn, because it was surely some time in October that a performance was seriously delayed because two of the cast had slipped and hurt themselves in B dressing-room corridor, and the reason for that was that the floor appeared to be flooded with something sticky and glutinous
Meanwhile, writers who wish to afford their readers the luxury of being able to breathe take a gentler approach. The simplest lines are often the most effective. James Baldwin’s beautiful opening to his 1962 novel Another Country – ‘He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square’ – is unpretentious and tells the reader very little; they must keep reading to find out who can be found at this particular location in New York, and when.
Simplicity, though, has its limits. While the first sentence of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) is one of the coolest first sentences in literature thanks to its minimalism – ‘Here is the house’ – I have often wondered at the adulation with which the first line of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) is met. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ is concise and unaffected, yes, but does not fill me with the excitement and foreboding of the rest of the novel. Then again, I adore the hilariously banal first line of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) for much the same reasons. ‘3 May. Bistritz – Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late’ is almost brazenly sparse, with nothing resembling even a sly wink hinting at the rollicking, sex-fuelled vampire-fest on which we are about to embark – oh, Mr. Stoker, how you tease us.
My personal favourites continue along these lines. Roald Dahl takes guffawing at his readers’ expense to the extreme in his short story ‘Pig’ from 1960. ‘Once upon a time, in the City of New York, a beautiful baby boy was born into this world, and the joyful parents named him Lexington’ should, to anybody familiar with Dahl, be pure comedy. A Dahlian fairy tale comes with a ‘definitely no happily-ever-after’ guarantee, and you can be certain that the events that befall the characters will ensure any joy and beauty they possessed in the beginning are radically diminished by the end, as this macabre little story illustrates.
Not a million miles away, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) opens with the positively eye-watering: ‘The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn’. Wilde crafts a wonderfully in-your-face first sentence, reeking of pollen and heady summer hay fever, made all the more humorous on a second reading of the novel, when the reader is familiar with the emphatically unlovely manner in which the novel ends. The following sentence could so easily have been ‘what could possibly go wrong?’.
First sentences come in all shapes and sizes. The ones which work best for me have a wink-wink-nudge-nudge quality to them. The problem with this approach, of course, is that the whole book needs to be read to discover what the author was (probably) chuckling about as they began the first chapter. But these are often the most intriguing first sentences anyway. With these, it is what is left unsaid that makes the magic happen.
I am always curious to hear from fellow bibliophiles, so if anybody has a favourite first sentence (or least favourite) that they would like to share with me, please feel free to get in touch with LitSoc! We’re a friendly bunch.
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