More on first lines part 2

[lettered]

Since I tend to be . . . really overwhelming in my capacity for meta, I split all my first-lines thoughts up! So here's part two of thoughts on first lines.

In the comments to my post on first lines, people quoted two first lines I really liked. Since my whole post was about how I didn’t like first lines, it was a welcome surprise, and it made me remember there is a certain kind of first line that I like very much indeed. However, while I love this style of first line, it’s not really always what’s best for the story, so I’m glad not all first lines are like this.

The first lines were:

“The day after my grandfather died he came down to breakfast.”

“When Character 1 went to mass, he only had four hours left to live.”

The first one is more compelling to me than the second, probably for several reasons. The first one implies something supernatural is afoot, and I like fantasy/magical realism. The first one is also going to be harder to explain than the second one, which makes me more interested to read on for that explanation. The first one is also less commonplace—many stories begin with someone about to die, but fewer begin with ghosts going to breakfast.

Still, both lines are compelling to me because they say something that requires explanation, and also tell you exactly what the story is going to be about. They reminded me of this line:

“There's a man in the habit of hitting me on the head with an umbrella.”

I tried to think of other similar lines. I know that they exist, and that they have drawn me in immediately, but I can’t really remember any of them.

The umbrella line above requires explanation and tells you exactly what the story is about, but it also has the bizarre quality of the ghost eating breakfast, and is in fact even more bizarre than the ghost eating breakfast. So I guess “bizarre” is another thing that draws me in. The umbrella story is magical realist, and magical realism is bizarre, which is I guess a big reason I like magical realism so much. I started thinking of other magical realist stories, and remembered this line:

”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 is from One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. I have to say I don’t find this nearly as intriguing as the umbrella line, because a person having a habit of hitting other people over the head with an umbrella is still much more bizarre and unusual than someone standing in front of a firing squad.

However, this first line is exceptionally well done. It does require explanation, and it feels like it’s going to tell you what the story is going to be about (it’s going to be about a boy discovering ice with his dad, and then somehow ending up in front of a firing squad many years later). However, what’s best about this line is that Colonel Aureliano Buendia does not face the firing squad until maybe halfway through the book, and yet it keeps getting mentioned—the thoughts going through his head when he does face the firing squad.

Also, the book isn’t really about the firing squad. In fact, it’s barely about Aureliono Buendia.

The first line doesn’t have to tell you what the actual story is about, so much as tell you what a story is about. The reader gets to form an expectation. Eventually that expectation will be met (Aureliano does, after all, face the firing squad) but it won’t happen in the way that you expect and a lot of other things might happen on the way.

You might think the ghost eating breakfast line is about the existence of ghosts, and how the narrator deals with his grandfather-the-ghost. You as a reader would form those expectations, but if the story turned out to be about the narrator fighting a dragon with the aid of his grandfather the ghost, that would be okay too. It would probably even be a better story!

Since I couldn’t think of any more examples, I started thinking about what the first line of books would be if they were all written in this way:

”The day Harry Potter found out he was a wizard, his Uncle Vernon was still pretending the entire family was normal, and never got up to any funny business.” (Harry Potter)

”The Hunger Games were a vicious, ugly sport, in which your chance of living was mostly zero, which was why, when the time came to choose participants, Katniss volunteered.” (Hunger Games)

”In the course of his life, Jean Valjean broke parole, escaped prison, stole from a man of the cloth and a young child, and was beloved and admired by almost everyone.” (Les Miserables)

”Elizabeth Bennett and Mister Darcy eventually married, despite the fact that he had cast aspersion upon almost her entire family, and she had vowed never to dance with him at all.” (Pride and Prejudice)

”On the day Jane Eyre was supposed to get married, she instead met a madwoman and argued for at least three hours with a man whom she realized she couldn’t marry after all, on account of the fact that the madwoman was actually his wife.” (Jane Eyre)

I actually love all of these first lines! They’re really the only kind of first lines I think I like. Admittedly, the real first line of Pride and Prejudice is pretty darn good. ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.") The real line still doesn’t grip me the way the one above does. The one above makes me go, “BUT HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?” whereas the actual first line of Pride and Prejudice just makes me go, “Okay, I see you’re sassy; what else you got?”

Several people have mentioned in comments that they don't use first sentence to decide whether to read a story or not, but they do like and admire first sentences that are clever or lyrical or intriguing. I think I may be having trouble understanding this. I mean, I like and admire any line that is clever or lyrical or intriguing. I love the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, but I would love it just as much if it was the eightieth sentence. I can see where it's valuable as a first sentence, since it sets the tone and the situation that kicks off the plot right away, but lots of other lines in Austen adequately demonstrate her tone and set up situations, so while I see that this line is admirable I don't really see it as exceptional as a first line? I feel like I'm missing the point, here.

Anyway, I’m infinitely glad that none of these books used the lines above, because they give away everything! The beauty of so many stories is finding out what is going to happen. It’s all about build up, which is why a bland, uninteresting first line that doesn’t tell me anything is a-ok with me. I wanna go somewhere with a story; I don’t want it to all go downhill from line one.

Okay so anyway, what do you think about this kind of first line? What are some first lines that create reader expectation for the possible plot—lines that require explanation, and are bizarre? If you were going to rewrite your first lines from your favorite books in this style, what would they be?

Comments

[likeadeuce]

I know I have mentioned the 'firing squad' line as a favorite, though I certainly don't think that every book would benefit from that type of opening (as much as I love your examples.) But it works for that book because it lets you know (or at least sets you up to learn, in the opening paragraphs that follow) what kind of book you're going to read -- one that is about the connections that form between seemingly disparate things that occur far apart in time, the way that people who are no longer present linger in memory. (Caveat, of course it's a translation, and I don't know enough Spanish to know how well that translation captures the original; but it does let me know what kind of book the translated book is going to be.)

I don't know that I can explain it better than that, though maybe it has something to do with my being a reader who is primarily drawn to voice, and so I'm keyed into how the voice of this particular book or story is different from everything else I've ever read (even if it's by the same writer/ has the same ostensible first-person narrator.)

Of course, I can also admire good sentences anywhere in a story -- my favorite sentence in English literature is, "He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square." -- plopped down somewhere in the middle of Mrs. Dalloway. Now I can imagine -- and Woolf might at some point have imagined -- a novel that started with that sentence, but it's a rather different novel, where Septimus and his experience in the war are in the foreground. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." -- is, I think, clearly a better beginning for the novel that was written and quite an achievement as a first line in itself. (What are the flowers for? Why does it need to be pointed out that she's doing it herself/what is the default situation that this is a departure from.)

I don't know if this is helping or just making things more murky!