LITERARY FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Getting the first sentence right can be crucial
Ask an average group of book lovers to name the main character in L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between 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 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. If you’re too dull, you may find readers making their excuses and leaving. Too flashy and you may already have peaked, with everything else you say proving a bit of an anticlimax.
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. Or as Louise Doughty, author of the recent bestseller Apple Tree Yard, more lyrically suggests: “Getting the first sentence right is the key to the magic door that leads to rest of the book.”
The rules for getting it right, meanwhile, are equally fluid. Or, if you prefer, arbitrary. 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 onesentence 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 forbid 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 arresting, yet there are any number of overlaps and subcategories. One obvious way to arrest is with a big abstract declaration, 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.”
Yet another is simply to startle. “It was the day my grandmother exploded,” says the narrator at the beginning of Iain Banks’s The Crow Road. Less flashily, but no less startlingly, there’s Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
As for the quieter approach, the key is surely to set the scene as intriguingly as possible — ideally while pulling off the trick King identifies of writing a sentence that, as far as the reader is concerned, “tells you more than you think it tells you — more than maybe registers in your conscious mind.”
King’s own favourite example is from James M. Cain’s hard-boiled classic The Postman Always Rings Twice: “They threw me off the haycart about noon.” As King explains, not only are we at once in the middle of a story, but we already know, if we stop to think about it, that the narrator is a drifter who hustles to get by.
Or take John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: “The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races, Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.” Here, clearly, is the story’s equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings in the jungle — and so an indication that the complete version of “the truth” is likely to take some unravelling. Thanks to Major Dover’s fate, rank and surname, we might also pick up a faint hint of some sort of foreign threat to the British establishment.
In other words, some scenesetting first sentences can take a while to reveal their full significance. Mantel’s “So now get up” initially sounds merely like a cruel remark from a brutal father. But then the rest of the book shows us just how high up Thomas Cromwell manages to get. Similarly, 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 perhaps one thing that unites the best opening sentences, whether flamboyant or more understated: They also introduce us to the author’s voice — whether flamboyant or more understated. Another reason Stephen King rates Cain’s first line so highly is that “we can see right away that ... there’s not going to be much floridity in the language, no persiflage.”
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 that its inhabitants imagine their peculiar way of looking at things is both true and universal. Not only that, but it also summarizes the key engine of the plot, hints at nearly all the themes to come — 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.
An opening line should ... say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
STEPHEN KING