An Aye-write Guide To Opening Lines!

An aye-write Guide to Opening Lines!

Let’s face it. Opening lines are tough. Along with your last line, the opening line will probably be the toughest part of your book to write. A good opening line should be intriguing, inviting, or captivating - enough to hook your reader and reel them in for the rest of the story. 

So what should an opening line do exactly? Here are five main guidelines:

Spark the curiosity of a reader

Create an emotional connection

Provide entertainment (especially humour)

Shock the reader

Set something in motion

Some opening lines might only do one of these. Some might do more than one. There are some that may not do any of these at all. Ultimately, you do what works for your story - but these are good to keep in mind. 

.-.-.

So How Do we Do This? 

There is no definitive way to write a good opening line. Good opening lines, like stories and writing styles themselves, are very subjective. Every writing “rule” can be broken if you can use it effectively. But here are some of my guidelines - and examples - to get you started: 

Mystify Your Readers

Make your first sentence shocking, intriguing, open-ended or foreshadowing something as-of-yet unknown. Your reader should be full of questions about what they’ve just read. 

Example: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

.-.-.

Establish a sense of setting/tone/character

This is a very broad one and can fall in under the umbrella term of “description”. If your novel has a strong sense of place, atmosphere or character, beginning with your unique “selling point” is an excellent way to involve readers in what you’re all about. 

Remember to be genuine, though. Start as you mean to go on. For example, there is (usually) little sense in beginning with a dark and sombre tone if the rest of your book is light-hearted.

Examples:

“The sky was the colour of cat vomit” (Setting)

“All children, except one, grow up.” (Character)

“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” (Tone) 

.-.-.

Begin with action/conflict

Action doesn’t need to be fast or blisteringly exciting. It doesn’t have to be sword fights and explosions. Action is simply a character doing something, anything, in an active and engaging way. 

Similarly, with conflict, you can start a book with the exact moment a character figures out they are in trouble to create a sense of urgency, or you can highlight conflict between two characters, for example, through dialogue.

Examples:

“Hala is running for class when her cell phone rings. She slows to take it from her pocket, glances at the screen: UNKNOWN CALLER.” 

“They left Abal in a hurry, after Ozam’s mother killed the constable.”

.-.-.

My Handy Hints for Opening Lines!

Don’t deceive with an opening line – a false premise is disappointing. 

Keep it purposeful and relevant! 

Be bold! Resist the temptation to be “fluffy” – get to the point!

Starting with dialogue can be confusing to some readers if there are no context clues who is speaking or to whom.  

Unusual/unexpected ideas or descriptions are a good starting point, especially if you can catch a reader off guard. 

TIL that there is a phrase for this concept I’ve been distantly aware of my whole entire life

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?  

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived. 

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.

This is the Sherlock I need!

the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that “nice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to think” is possibly the funniest character ever devised 

Very handy, I like describing outfits too much

Are you really…. not supposed to…. describe what your characters are wearing….

This isn’t hmmm, this is pure genius

hmmm

This is such an important message

#181: Venturing Into the Unknown

To write, you have to face yourself. That can be incredibly difficult sometimes. Harder than many other things are. But before we get into that, imagine that you’re a firefighter.

You’re pretty new — just been through training. You’ve read all the books, done all the drills. Today is your first shift. The sirens go off at the station. It’s a massive fire — an entire residential building engulfed in flames. You arrive with the rest of the crew. There’s absolute mayhem outside. You can hear screams coming from within.

On paper, you’re qualified to get in and get those people out. In reality, however, nobody knows how this could end. The fire doesn’t care what the textbook says. It makes its own rules. Even an experienced firefighter can end up in a difficult situation.

Writing is sometimes like this. No matter how much you study the craft or outline the story before you start writing, at some point, you’ll be venturing into the unknown. You’ll have very little idea whether the thing will work. The voices inside the burning building are your stories, and you’ll have to get them out of there.

Where this metaphor couldn’t be more different are the stakes. Firefighters put everything on the line. Maybe the conspiracy nut that lives on the third floor illegally stacked his flat full of ammo to protect himself when the Illuminati come knocking. You open the door to his place. A massive explosion blasts through the building. There’s nothing you could’ve done.

As a writer, it’s not even close. The worst thing that can happen? You will have to throw the story away. But you can write another one. And you’re free to keep what you’ve learned and use it to make the next one better.

While that’s not easy at all to part ways with hundreds of thousands of words that you might have worked on for months and years, you still get another shot. And another one after that. As long as you want to keep going, you can keep going.

So when you’re stuck or unsure where to go next, just pick one thing and run with it. You may be entering a burning building, but no matter what happens you will come out alive.

Don’t be afraid to take risks. As a writer, that’s one thing that you can afford.

Only one thing can be fatal to a writer: doing nothing at all.

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Past Editions

#180: Will It Work?, January 2021

#179: Throwaway Stories, January 2021

#178: Progress Over Perfection, January 2021

#177: Change Is Good, January 2021

#176: Start Before You’re Ready, January 2021