Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

Dear Author,

I know you don't know me, so you haven't seen my rant about first lines. But you can't possibly have made it to the publication stage without seeing some convention panel, how-to book, website, or writing class on the vital importance of a grabber opening.

Just for the record? "Your ass looks great in that dress" is not a good first line.

Still, this was a review book, so I soldiered on: sometimes a stumble at the beginning is made up for later. Victoria Laurie has great grabber lines and a bad habit of putting them somewhere between paragraph 3 and paragraph 10. (She needs an editor to pay a touch more attention to her, or possibly vice versa.) Terry Pratchett has started typing any old thing on the first page, but then he's Terry Pratchett and everyone knows he'll deliver.

You, on the other hand, are your Very First Book. And your Very First page and a half was about whether said ass looked good because of a girdle or control top pantyhose. I know you were trying to establish your characters, but by the time the plot started abruptly on page 5, all you'd established was that I didn't like either one of them and couldn't care less about their fate.

Honestly, while I'm not a big fan of the future-tense-then-back-up opening (where we join our plot already in progress and back up to establish the scene) it is SO much stronger an opening about asses and hose! Because the point of this book is not that the narrator has a nice ass nor that she has the obligatory chic friend as Greek chorus. It's about the mystery. So start with the damned mystery! You can still introduce your characters, but within a context that isn't utterly vapid!

"Have they found your car yet?" "No, and I have no idea how I'm going to replace it on a professor's salary." That's pallid, but it at least introduces some form of the action.

"Campus crime is up, I see. They've had a break in, your car has been stolen... wonder what's next?" There's some context. Or, since this is a rural college: "You wouldn't expect there to be much crime in an isolated university in the middle of the woods, but that didn't stop someone from stealing my car. You'd think that they would have taken a pampered student's rolling status symbol rather than a professor's clunker." Maybe not page-turners as opening lines, but they aren't as bad a turnoff as a butt discussion.

But then again, it's a first book and you have limited time to make your mark in the overcrowded cozy world, so why not get right down to brass tacks? "If I thought getting my car stolen was bad news, that was nothing compared to the police finding it with the body of one of my students in the trunk."

Now THERE'S a must-read opener!

But(t) no, you went for the rear view. Which one only gets when one walks away, so bye-bye!

Signed,

Moving on

Y'all know I'm a tough reviewer. Between reviewing and burning through the TBR stack, these days a book has pretty much one page to coax me into willingly reading the rest of it, often only one paragraph. And yet - it can be done. I was putty in the hands of Brad Strickland and Thomas Fuller when they spent an adjectival paragraph describing the beauty of the night at the beach, concluding that it would be ever so romantic if only the woman the narrator was with wasn't dead.

But very often the difference between a quick toss or a grumpy review is a single line, that one shining soundbite that sums up the book's tone perfectly and sucks me in. That golden hook that editors and writing teachers tell you to use to reel the reader into the story really does exist.

This is one reader's view of what works and what doesn't.

What NEVER works, ever, are cheerful little physical descriptions (Strickland and Fuller only got away with it because they made me laugh). To make up an example, "Little Milly skipped happily through the town in her new white dress with the red ribbons, singing to herself" is a snoozer. I have no reason to give a rat's ass about Milly, her dress, or the town. If the next sentence is "She was on her way to her Granny's house with a basket full of fresh, hot bread," I've snarled "UGH!" and tossed the book away before I ever got to the second paragraph with the wolf, the teakettle, the 3 rolls of duct tape, and the bottle of strawberry conditioner.

Dialog that is equally unenlightening is equally poisonous. "Has the family come for tea?" "No, not yet." "Well they don't want to be late for my special pie, now do they?" - and again I'm gone before we ever get to the axe and the question of how bloodspatter ended up on the inside of the pantry door.

Admittedly, by this standard I would have never read my childhood favorite, A Wrinkle in Time... but still I want you to give me something, people! Give me something to care about, something that says your book is at least as interesting as the other 100 in the To Be Read stack!

What gets the benefit of the doubt is something that starts in a little bit of action or foreshadowing. Even "Look out!" "What?" "You were about to step in a puddle" will do. Yes, it's a cheap trick, but you've gotten me three lines into the book, and that's more than Muffy got. (For instance, I can't remember the opening line for Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye - but she grabbed me very quickly with "Sharon was a pretty young woman in her mid-thirties, with short blond hair, too much makeup, a recent boob job, and not a clue in sight.")

Sometimes just confusing me counts: "Some things start before other things." The huh? Okay, I'll read more and see if that makes sense. (This is a real quote, BTW. The author is fond of openings like this; another book begins "Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree." One of my all time favorites starts "Now read on" - which is the sort of first line that only being a total fan of the author would let me pass by.)

What works every time? To adapt a phrase from competition costuming, "Descriptive is good, funny is better, descriptive and funny is best." My favorite opening lines, often to my favorite books, are the ones that tell you right up front what you're getting into, both in plot and tone:

"There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he very nearly deserved it." Okay, this is the story of a rotter. Who is he, why is he so awful, and will he get his comeuppance?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Husband-hunting ahoy!

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." ...but she's gonna be one, hook or crook!

"Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it." Jaded but rightous heros can be interesting - far less icky sweet than unjaded ones and less distasteful than unrighteous ones.

"The day I died started out bad and got worse in a hurry." I defy you not to die of curiousity right now!


The lines don't have to be short, as long as they're descriptive (and funny doesn't hurt):

"Chicago, 1929. There are a thousand stories in the naked city; and when you're a dwarf at four-foot-one, they all look that much taller." It's a dwarf, it's gangster Chicago, and it's not taking itself too seriously.

"When Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, bought Canterville Chase, every one told him he was doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the place was haunted." Headstrong American vs haunt. Make popcorn and settle in for a good fight.

"They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged." Who is he, why is he going to be hung? That was enough to get me into the rest of the paragraph, which sealed the deal: "The man going to be hanged had been named Moist von Lipwig by doting if unwise parents, but he was not going to embarrass the name, insofar as that was still possible, by being hung under it. To the world in general, and particularly on that bit of it known as the death warrant, he was Alfred Spangler."

This is what I want. Something that sums up the tone and the plot in a single line. You're gonna do it for the pitch letter, might as well do it in the first paragraph too. (I could imagine that a good opening line suffices for both anyway.)


What opening lines have worked for you, and why?

And bonus quiz - Muffy, the pie, and the puddle aren't real, but all the other quotes are. Guess title and author!