IN THE BEGINNING …
Getting that first sentence right is key to holding the reader’s attention
Ask an average group of booklovers to name the main character in L.P. Hartley’s novel The GoBetween and you’ll likely be met with blank faces. But ask them about the opening sentence and many would recognize: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
It’s hard to think of any other novel that’s become so much less famous than its own first line. Yet now that The Go-Between has be- come a nifty way of adding literary gravitas to your conversation (or writing), it’s easy to forget how good it is: not just a powerfully striking aphorism, but also the perfect start to a novel that’s both nostalgic and a careful exploration of what nostalgia means.
But most important of all, it’s a line that makes us want to read on. If, as is generally agreed, English literature began with Beowulf, then the first word in our entire literary canon is hwaet, usually translated as “attend!” or “hear!” or simply “listen!” a word that could be used to translate the essential meaning of the start of every fictional work ever since.
As Stephen King put it more than 1,000 years later: “An opening line should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”
It’s probably overstating it to argue that the first sentence will make or break a book — just as first impressions may not make or break a date. Get off to a bad start, however, and you’ll immediately be struggling to gain the reader’s affection.
Get off to a good start and readers will relax, knowing they’re in safe hands.
The obvious question, then, is how the reader can best be enticed. Less obvious is what the answer might be. There’s such a variety of theories that Somerset Maugham seems sharper than ever to have claimed, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”
Opinion is even divided on where the opening line should come in the writing process. Joyce Carol Oates said “the first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written.” But for Stephen King, nothing at all can get done until the first sentence is perfect.
The rules for getting it right, meanwhile, are equally fluid.
Most creative writing courses advise against opening with a line of dialogue, but that didn’t stop Hilary Mantel from starting Wolf Hall with the one-sentence paragraph, “So now get up,” spoken by Thomas Cromwell’s father as he beats up his young son.
Elmore Leonard’s much-respected 10 Rules of Writing sternly forbids beginning with a description of the weather, but that doesn’t appear to have put many people off John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”
The traditional divide for first lines is between quiet scene-setting and something more deliberately arresting, yet even within this are any number of overlaps and subcategories. One obvious way to arrest is with a big abstract dec- laration, as in The Go-Between or Anna Karenina with its celebrated: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” a sentence whose rhetorical flourish seems to have blinded its many fans to the awkward fact that it’s not remotely true.
Another is to summarize the whole book before you go any further, as in “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”
Some scene-setting first sentences can take a while to reveal their full significance.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar with, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York” (another opening that breaks Leonard’s weather rule). Plainly the narrator, Esther Greenwood, is feeling lost in what feels to her a distinctly menacing everyday environment — but why mention the Rosenbergs, the married couple sent to the electric chair for being Soviet spies? Only later, when Esther has undergone electric-shock therapy for depression, do we understand the reason — and why Plath chillingly chose “electrocuted” over, say, “executed.”
But there’s one easy way to prove just how overlapping all these categories and techniques can be — and that’s by means of probably the most famous opening of the lot: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
At first sight, the beginning of Pride and Prejudice might seem to belong in the ringing-declaration camp. In fact, of course, it’s more of a scene-setting satire on the world in which the novel takes place: a world so insular its inhabitants imagine their peculiar way of looking at things is both true and universal. It also summarizes the key engine of the plot — money, class, gender and marriage — and firmly introduces the author’s voice: often ironic, sometimes sly, but never entirely lacking in sympathy for the characters.
And all in just 23 words. No wonder so many people have accepted Pride and Prejudice’s invitation to listen.