From the first to last (1): opening lines
All writing, fiction and non-fiction, needs to grab the reader's attention, which makes crafting a memorable opening line an essential skill
Making words count
One of the first and most important things you think about if you write newspaper articles regularly is the opening sentence. Rarely does the author have much say over the headline—that’s the province of the sub-editors—so this is your shop window, the opportunity to seize the attention of the reader’s restless eye and persuade it to linger and persist. It needs to combine information, of course, and at least an outline of what the article is about, but you also want to convey something of your style and the tone of the whole piece: are you serious, analytical, sarcastic, light-hearted, outraged, grief-stricken? Sometimes it can take a disproportionate amount of consideration, and sometimes, less often but wonderfully, it simply bursts in full form into your mind, ready to put on the page.
Similar weight attaches to the concluding words. You want them to be strong and memorable, perhaps even ringing and epigrammatic: an 800-word column which just peters out like a tap when the water is shut off is both a disappointment and a failure. There should be a degree of summation and conclusion, and it should be a satisfying coda, an affirmation that the reader’s few minutes were wisely invested.
Opening lines
The first and last sentences of novels encompass far more meaning and purpose, but are popular fodder for quizzes, listicles and bathroom books. The author has much more freedom than the humble columnist: if Moby-Dick; or, The Whale had been 800 words, Herman Melville would not have opened with “Call my Ishmael”. As the first salvo of more than 600 pages, however, it is perfect, cryptic, austere, slightly sour. You have so many questions. Why Ishmael? Is it his name? If it isn’t, why does he want to be known that way? Who is Ishmael?
Here are a few opening lines you’ll be familiar with, and some very brief observations on why they work.
“Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” (The Outsider, Albert Camus)
If that doesn’t draw you in, I can’t help you. There’s a basic set-up: a narrator whose mother has died, but there is already something weird about the relationship, shown by his uncertainty. How did she die? Are we being told the truth? Is the mother dead at all? (There is very dense, involved debate about the translation of these words from the original French. For more, read this 2012 piece in The New Yorker.)
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen)
It’s hard to fault Austen here. She encapsulates the plot of the novel and lays out the situation of Fitzwilliam Darcy, with whom Elizabeth Bennet eventually falls in love. More than that, though, it has the confident air of a pronouncement of a general law, recognised after great consideration. And, of course, it expresses a “truth” about Georgian society but one which will be undermined by what is to follow.
“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.” (The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway)
This kicks off the last novel published in Hemingway’s lifetime. You can’t deny that it sets the scene in a straightforward and informative way, and hints at the drama which is to come. But it is also classic Hemingway, almost parodically so: clipped, staccato, blunt. Famously he sniped at William Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
I can’t speak for other writers, but when it comes to fiction, I’ve always been driven by characters and dialogue more than plot—maybe I shouldn’t admit that—and I regard the craft of writing, of choosing and shaping and polishing words then arranging them in exactly the right order, as both important and enormously enjoyable. For that reason, I suppose, first lines have tended to come early to me. They somehow act to crystallise what I’ve been thinking about, drawing together vague and half-formed thoughts, characters under development and fragments of dialogue, and they act as an advertisement for the reader. In addition, though, they act a signpost for me as the author, a way to set me in motion in the right direction even if I don’t yet know the final destination.
For the short story “Au revoir, tristesse”, which I submitted for the first anthology of the Writing Salon, I knew more or less what the situation was going to be. On the off-chance you read it—follow the link! The stories are great!—I will avoid spoilers but it takes place at a funeral. The narrator is female, and it considers her interaction with the other mourners. All of that was distilled into the line of dialogue with which it seemed natural to begin.
“I’m so sorry, Eleanor.”
I think it worked: but others must be the judge.
For “Who needs sleep?”, in the second anthology, again it seemed that dialogue was the obvious introduction. It was a story about someone waking suddenly, dealing with how we rest, how much we need and how we stay asleep. So it seemed natural to start with the interruption of a dream.
“I don’t know!” I woke up yelling.
That seemed to me to grab the reader and offer enough to keep going: what don’t you know? Why are you yelling? Who’s asking?
I notice that I have an instinct to drop the reader into the middle of the situation: no Austen-style declarations of nature or principle, nor a summation of the narrative arc. It’s what Horace christened in medias res, of course, “into the middle of things”, in his Ars Poetica when describing the way in which Homer exemplified the ideal epic poet. The Iliad, after all, does not begin with the seduction of Helen by Paris and her journey from Sparta to Troy, much less with the birth of Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra from the egg laid by Leda.
He doesn’t start Diomede’s return from Troy with his
Uncle Meleager’s death, or the War with two eggs:
He always hastens the outcome, and snatches the reader
Into the midst of the action, as if all were known…
If there is a reason beyond instinct, it’s because the Austen style, or an opening like Dickens’s famous “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in A Tale of Two Cities, immediately make me feel that the story is being told be a detached, omniscient narrator. There is nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t the tone in which I write or with which I feel comfortable.
The same is true of the (current) opening of the Great Novel, the under-construction meisterwerk which always occupies a corner of my brain and never lets me forget its presence. It could hardly be more in medias res but I hope, when the damned thing is finished, that it will seem like a satisfying signpost.
Felicity slumped back on the sofa and groaned piteously to herself. “I shouldn’t have had that last whisky.”
One day, I hope to be able to invite you to read on.
Some of the best
Here are some magnificent openings from some outstanding books. I’ve tried to choose some which may be less well known than Dickens or Tolstoy or Kafka, but I have a very poor sense sometimes of what people have and haven’t read, veering between underestimation and overestimation. So there we are: maybe these will be hoary by now, or maybe you’ll find them novel and interesting.
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” (The Secret History, Donna Tartt)
The Secret History, which I first read shortly after it was published in 1992, captivated me and it remains one of my favourite novels (I explained why for i News at the end of 2022). I think this gambit is perfect: it gives you the heart of the story—it’s almost a spoiler—but also sets Tartt’s tone perfectly, the strange, genteel, lyrical mood of the book.
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.” (The Crow Road, Iain Banks)
You don’t get much more arresting than that. The Crow Road was published in the same year as The Secret History, I notice, though there are few enough similarities. I think I saw the BBC adaptation, from 1996, first and then went back to the book but loved it. Banks’s opening has a tinge of the 19th century expository author about it but is both shocking and funny, as the novel continues to be.
“James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami airport and thought about death.” (Goldfinger, Ian Fleming)
While the success of the James Bond film franchise has secured Ian Fleming’s place in creative immortality, the books remain substantially less familiar than the cinematic adaptations. There is a school of thought that deprecates Fleming, regarding him as simplistic, clichéd, even crude. I disagree: as the author of commercial novels he was extremely gifted, with a clear sense of plot and characterisation, and a punchy way with words honed in his days as a journalist at Reuters. The books are a product of the 1950s (Goldfinger was published in 1959), and their tough, masculine, stripped-back language is exactly appropriate. How can you not read on after this?
“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” (Brighton Rock, Graham Greene)
Greene is one of my favourite authors and he could dazzle in all sorts of ways, but when I first read Brighton Rock, which was published in 1938, I had no idea it would be so terrifying, claustrophobic and tragic. There’s also an urgency about it, and that’s perfectly captured here. I also have to wonder if the sense of doom and inevitable fate that hangs over these words stems from Greene’s Catholicism, which infused so much of his work.
“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” (Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion)
I mean, come on. A novel about the superficiality and nihilism of Hollywood at the death of the 1960s? That opening says everything, brilliantly relying on Shakespeare to have laid the foundations but almost inverting his characterisation. Exquisite.
That seems a convenient place to pause. I touched briefly on closing lines at the beginning, but I will come back to those in more detail another time.
*****
I have written more extensively about the Writing Salon, why I enjoy it and the anthologies it produces here.
I read The Secret History after it was recommended by a friend. I could not put it down. Tarrt writes exquisitely and the plot and characters are fantastic...and yet, I hated the ending. It is one of the few books I've read where I disliked most of the characters.
"I also have to wonder if the sense of doom and inevitable fate that hangs over these words stems from Greene’s Catholicism, which infused so much of his work."
Perhaps that says more about your view of Catholicism?