You’d better get it right. It’s your first contact with an agent / publisher / reader. It gives the first clue to style, genre, voice. It sets the tone. It doesn’t need to be extraordinary, or shocking, or outrageously funny. But it does need to be strong.
Here are a few first lines from novels around my house. See if you can guess where they’re from. And what the author’s trying, if anything, to achieve. I’ve underlined what I regard as important words.
An easy one to start with:
1. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
2. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
3. There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
4. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
5. My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
6. We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone.
7. For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.
8. The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born – we weren’t even conceived.
9. Chapter 2 It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house.
10. My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema.
11. Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill.
12. The first thing that strikes you is how much he's spinning the ball.
Click on comments to see how you got on.
