First Lines - Tumblr Posts
First lines are the writing equivalent of drawing hands
“I was ten years old when my parents were killed by pirates. This did not bother me as much as you might think—I hardly knew my parents.”
and this isn’t even in the top 10 funniest lines of the chapter but it’s somehow also one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read?!!!
The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone by Jaclyn Moriarty, everyone. Please read it.
First Line Tag Game
Rules: post the first spoken lines of the main characters (however you define that) of your WIP with no context whatsoever.
hm, this is a good one...i have like 3 wips right now but i’ll go with the best one for dialogue :^)
Bhijirio: “Can I ask something?”...“How do you hold forks? I mean, how do you do anything? Your hands are literally the size of plates.” Miraak: “I ask Tharya to do it for me.”
thank you for the tag @nusaran! tagging forth: @elventhief, @nuwanders, and anyone else who sees this and wants to join in! (tag me so i can see when you do it, i wanna look at y’alls wips)
First Lines Challenge
I was tagged to do this by @steampunkserpent27 and it looked super fun so I thought I’d give it a try!
For this challenge you list the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have fewer than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line. Then tag some people to take part.
Inexplicable Things (wip (currently 31K)) (E) When Harry steps into the lobby of the DMLE he freezes for a second.
How to Say Goodbye (7.3K) (T) 1. The first step is running away
Attic Ephemera (.4K) (T) Harry’s cleaning out the attic when he finds the letter.
Infiltrate the Slytherins (8.9K) (T) Blaise Zabini moved in with them on a dark rainy night.
Bonded (16K) (T) “Kingsley Shacklebolt hates me,” Harry announces dramatically stepping out of the flames into his sitting room.
Falling (1.6K) (M) They were about 10 minutes into making dinner when it all started to go awry.
Boy with a Dragon Tattoo (4K) (T) The only thing Draco remembers about his first day of eight year is Harry Potter's tattoos.
I’m tagging @sorry-i-ship-drarry, @silver-de-vonne, @phoebe-delia, and anyone else who sees this and wants to participate! It was fun to revisit some of my old pieces and see how much my writing as grown since then. This challenge also helped me really think about how important the first line of a piece and be.
First/Last Line Tag!!!!
More tags! More tags! @sabewebb gave me this one
rules: make a new post and share the first and last line(s) you wrote
Characters:
Valerie-
"But I'm always on sweeping duty!"
"Guts!"
Oakley-
"Goodness! What happened?"
"Please, Valerie. Just let me think."
Connor-
"I don't like it here. I want to go home."
"Yeah."
Steven-
"Hi, I'm Steven. Don't call me Steve."
"I'm gonna hurl."
-------
Last Lines I Wrote (general):
Oh, God. The girl. Was she dead? Connor couldn't tell. He smelled blood, a lot of it. He tasted it. He bit her. Like some feral animal! Like some kind of monster. She's breathing. That's good, right? Alarick howled. Go back. But she's dying! What can you do? You can't help her. You hurt her. You are your mother's monster after all.
Some fun Hidnight trivia, as a treat:
The girl Connor bites in this scene is named Florence and she's a character in a spin-off short story set in the same universe. Florence was originally a completely separate story I dreamed up one night as I struggled to fall asleep then later decided to put in the same world. However, its inciting incident (Florence being bitten) didn't align with the lore of Hidnight which is that only certain werewolves can transmit lycanthropy via bite (Connor becomes one of them). I then (independently) realized that I was protecting Connor from consequences too much so I let him actually fuck up and hurt people and suddenly Florence fit in the same universe!
I made this note back in May:
I keep coming up with spin-off stories set in the same world as Hidnight except no I don't because the inciting incidents fundamentally conflict with the important world logic previously established in the core story.
Coming up with these spin-offs has helped me cement the themes of the original story so it's not all bad.
There was a strict dichotomy between the car ride to the bar and the car ride back. The kind of dichotomy that, if told, would leave the two girls on the ride there with only one response, and in the strongest sense of the word, bullshit.
-Beyond, September 2023
(s.m.)