What makes a great opening line?
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>I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion.
>I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.
>I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.
You might be surprised these were generated by GPT-2 https://www.aiweirdness.com/how-to-begin-a-novel-19-11-19/.
> Let me tell you, death is boring.
I hadn't read that line in about a year, so it was cool to look back at.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
That masterpiece took me a long time to digest and did indeed change me.
LIFE IN this society being, at best, an utter bore
and no aspect of society being at all relevant to
women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible,
thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the
government, eliminate the money system, institute
complete automation and destroy the male sex.
Actually, I wonder if I could accurately guess my own ratings by how much I liked the first line.
A perfect opening line. Followed by a long paragraph beating the same topic to death. And who remembers the rest-of-the-story.
Unforgettable, brilliant. (Find the original large-format hardback, not the paperback re-issue that can't possibly recapture the exuberant pictures spread across the pages.)
(I guess you may have been thinking of a different book...?)
The opening line and following run-on sentence has acquired a bit of a cult following and inspired a contest for best worst fictional opening: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
It's possible the author you linked was inspired by this as well.
More than possible; I'm pretty sure it's deliberate. They like to take well-known, even clichéd, elements and re-imagine them in new and creative ways.
Stephen King has written about how the Dark Tower was written, and it came from the opening line.
A great opening line is an inspiration for the rest of the story, it sets the scene.
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
(Especially as an Englishman who is terrible at French)
“The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was”
There are many great lines, here's another one I've always liked:
"In the beginning, the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
―Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
"This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest." - A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick, Jonathan Swift, 1701.
"'What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." - Of Truth, Francis Bacon, 1625
"The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him." - Disintroductions, Ambrose Bierce, 1902
"Human being are curious creatures, and in nothing more curious than in the forms of diversion which they devise for themselves." - Evening Parties, Rose Macaulay, 1926
"The effort which people put up to avoid thinking might almost enable them to think and to have some new ideas." - Symmetry and Repetition, Lewis Namier, 1941
"The other day a cousin of mine was married; thought what God or myself had to do with it I do not know, but I was obliged to go to church." - The Sterner Sex, Rebecca West, 1913
"Sometimes it is so hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle.", Bad Poets, Randall Jarrell, 1953
I looked up some of the author's writings. She had an interesting opening line in one of her short stories, entitled "Endangered":[1]
"The artists were kept in cages."
An excellent book throughout, but an especially gripping opening line.
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
I think Seveneves was one of Stephenson's weaker novels overall, but you can't deny it has a killer opening line.
This has always been one of my favorite lines, and I think it says so much about humanity in eleven words, as well as setting the tone of the book.
-- Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light.
> The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judge’s daughter, fell last night.
It's very plain. The kind of sentence your eye just passes over while looking for something more obviously relevant. But the book itself is a mystery hidden in plain sight, and this mystery is both declared and resolved in the very first line of the book. That level of subtle, elegant engineering is what's so impressive about Wolfe, and what makes this book in particular so rewarding.
the Compiler. Opening this Summer, 2022.
Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. The whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
"He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, and especially the kind of dork who would presume that she would marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot a ring right out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the ring and a few miscellaneous bits of fingertip."
Well done!
It argues the short story has no time to waste, unlike the novel. It must grip us from the very first sentence, otherwise all is lost.
As an example, the preface recounts the story of a writing class professor who, fed up with every student writing dreadful and depressing stories about class warfare and the struggles of the proletariat, told his students in exasperation "don't just write about the proletariat and the dreadful existence of the oppressed. Add more variety! Please also consider spicier topics, and include an aristocrat now and then!"
(I'm quoting from memory and possibly making a mistake, but the next line stuck with me).
So the next day, the first student read a story which started like this:
"'What insolence!', cried the Duchess. 'Take your hand off my knee!'"
I think it's a great opening line.
“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.Something along the lines of, “And so it is with you.”
The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music . . . but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.
...
(93 chapters later)
IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
...
--- ---
That isn't a "first and last line are the same" but rather "the prologue and the epilogue are the same".
For my favorite self reference, however, is part of the Jhereg / Taltos series by Burst. He does it a couple times, though the one that sticks in my mind the most is a prologue that is a cleaning / clothing repair list. "Tear on left sleeve" type thing. Then each chapter, that issue happens to the clothes.
I want to say Ulysses but I don't remember exactly if it does
“- we came in?”
“Isn’t this where -“
- Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent
Unfortunately, television is digital now and dead channels are just black.
Doubly interesting because no-one, not even Gibson himself, can tell what visual imagery he was thinking of with that description. I always thought it was "gray snow/static", but TVs didn't always show that (they certainly don't today, as you pointed out). Depending on the era, dead channels alternated between black, static snow, blue, etc; when Gibson was talking dead channels it wasn't static snow.
Gibson has contradicted himself on different interviews about this. See replies and discussion for this question: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/163304/770
I love Neuromancer but the irony is how badly cyberpunk or indeed any sci-fi has predicted the future, the absence of smartphones being the most obvious example.
Analog TVs didn't always give static snow, by the way.
One of Gibson's latest answers is a retweet of Monica Lewinsky's (yes, that Monica) photo of a cloudy gray day and stating "that's exactly what I was thinking of". It looks nothing at all like an analog's TV static snow!
The quote is William Gibson, Neuromancer.
Neil Gaiman did a tribute to it in Neverwhere: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." because for a while, blue was the colour of an untuned channel.
Plenty of kids now probably don’t even grok what a channel number or TV is.
"Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection." the shadow-line
The Latin word for divide is exactly in the middle of the sentence.
"When last we left, St. Thomas of Becket's brains were splattered across the cathedral floor."
*murmuring, sounds of pens dropping*
Maybe not the greatest, but the whole paragraph’s pretty good:
> Theo, by occupation, was a devil. That is, he worked as apprentice and general servant to Anton, the printer. Before that, he was lucky enough to be an orphan, for the town fathers of Dorning prided themselves in looking after their needy. So, instead of sending him away to a King's Charity House, where he would be made miserable, they arranged the same for him locally. He was farmed out first to a cooper, then to a saddler, and in both cases did badly. Accidentally, he had learned to read, which in some opinion spoiled him for anything sensible. Anton finally agreed to take in the boy and teach him his trade.
And the rest of the page is great, and the rest of the chapter, and the whole book is a really great opening to a decent trilogy IMO (Westmark, by Lloyd Alexander).
Look I haven't seriously studied literature or anything, so maybe I'm being a philistine. But what in the world is the appeal of this? Doesn't balance clarity and curiosity - a lot of mundane details, not reason for me to care about their phone call. I guess it's weird in a meta sense, in how it bucks the trend for good openers?
I don't doubt some people genuinely like that line, but that just says to me that this question is so subjective and so unimportant in the grand scheme of things (do people seriously stop reading after a single sentence?) that it sounds bizarre to go as far as teaching a class on the topic.
“War has changed.
It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines.
War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine.
War has changed.
ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities.
Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control.
War…has changed.
The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history.
War…has changed.
When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.”
This is a great opening because while Solid Snake speaks, you are presented with a 5 minute showcase of everything unchanged about the war.
Chapter One Neris 2351-August-13
Call me Ishmael. Yeah I know, but in this case it’s really my name: Ishmael Horatio Wang. My parents had an unfortunate sense of humor. If they had known what I’d wind up doing with my life, they might have picked a different one—Richard Henry Dana, perhaps. Exactly why they picked Ishmael Horatio is a long, and not terribly interesting, story that started with the fact that Mom was an ancient lit professor and ended with my being saddled with these non sequitur monikers.
That particular story was over eighteen stanyers before the two Neris Company security guards showed up at my door with long faces and low voices. Perhaps it was their expressions, or that they were looking for me and not Mom, but either way I knew their visit wasn’t good. I didn’t think they had come to drag me off to juvie or anything. I’d never been a troublemaker like some of the others in the university enclave. They had come for me though—to tell me she was dead.
(I also saw an amusing tweet once, something like: Moby Dick has one of the most iconic openings in literature: "I hope you motherfuckers like reading about whales")
The first line didn't hook me, because picking up a book is generally a bigger effort than opening a page and looking at the first line.
This idea of "what makes a great opening line" is simply, to be simple to understand for me. You need to lead in to the next line and the next. The wandering text that was the first line of "We Love You Crispina" caused me to skip it. Once I reconsidered that it might have something important in it, I had to force myself to go back and re-read it. Multiple times. I am not going to remember that book.
Yesterday here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30617628
The main character gives his (and Joyce's?) theory of art: art should not create any response in the viewer. If it does, it mars the purity of the art. Joyce may be a great author; he certainly succeeded in writing a book that created no response whatsoever in me (other than annoyance at the time I wasted plowing through the tedium of something that I didn't care about whatsoever). That may be great art, but I don't have to like it.
"From the doorway of La Crónica Santiago looks at the Avenida Tacna without love: cars, uneven and faded buildings, the gaudy skeletons of posters floating in the mist, the gray midday. At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?"
La conversación en la catedral, Mario Vargas Llosa
This book also inspired the song "Killing an Arab" by The Cure.
"When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
A Spaniard in the Works, John Lennon http://beatlesnumber9.com/spaniard.html
"I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles"
"I'm waking up in the morning with problems on mind, motherfuck an education, and drug rehabilitation"
"Damned if I do, damned if I don't, holla fuck the world with a chest full of smoke"
Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years.
No worries, the ending is a happy one and we have the feeling that Conradin will live more than 5 more years.
- Gravity’s Rainbow
"I pulled into Nazareth . . ."
"Hey girl, what's your name (I like your style) . . ."
Post Office - Bukowski
Well, that's only half the line. The real punch is the next part:
> Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know
Puckoon, Spike Milligan
Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhtO4DsSazc
(I don't actually think this is good writing)
(The author later had this opening line as his epitaph. Where it made for a great closing line as well.)
Again.
Short story in Analog SF&F, but some searching suggests that it was a meme for writers for a while.
-- Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu.
* For a long time, I would go to bed early.
I started reading it in jail, after reading 1Q84 which had a line stating that the only place you'll ever get enough time to read that book is in prison.
Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
Steel Beach - John Varley.
— Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
"I take it he was agreeable?"
"He didn't really have a choice."
"Has he been infected?"
"Oh yes. Most certainly. When I mentioned we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic."