First Lines: Start in the Middle

I wrote a post the other day about beginning at the end.  When you’re stuck and don’t know where to start, sometimes it’s helpful to figure out where you’re going to end up.  Beginnings are daunting, probably much more so than endings.

In this post, I’ll talk about first lines.  We tend to do a lot of throat clearing, scene setting and meandering in our beginnings.  It’s boring for your reader, who wants to get to the meat of the story.  Worse, it’s a deal breaker for an agent who has limited time.  First sentences should be like that time you walked in on an argument or overheard a discussion you weren’t supposed to.  You don’t know how things started, you were just thrust into it.  You can do this with a story or a novel.  They say you should never start a novel with weather.  Plenty of novels do, but the advice is valid.  All you’re doing is unnecessary throat clearing and stage setting.  Take a look at a story or opening chapter of yours and see if it draws your reader in right away.

Now take note of these first lines:

Paul Auster in City of Glass begins his novel:

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”

Here Auster unnerves us, drawing upon something familiar that has happened to all of us.  We want to know what the wrong number started exactly.  What is the “it” that got started because of this simple wrong number?  Why did they call in the dead of night?  What was the emergency?  The novel could have begun with a long description of the narrator’s house or  bedroom, maybe a description of him getting into bed and so forth.  But it doesn’t.  It also puts us squarely in the future of the story.  He’s looking back, he’s telling us what started it all.  It’s already happened, and if we want to know what it is, well we’re going to have to keep reading.

Another example:  In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, Carver opens with this line:

“This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.”

The reader doesn’t enter the story hearing about the weather or with the wife and the narrator discussing whether or not the man is coming to stay.  It’s been decided.  He’s on his way already.  Only one of them knows the man, and furthermore he’s blind.  And like that, you’re along for the ride.

Remember this when you write and also when you read.  Great first lines almost always drop you into the story without much explanation, without holding your hand, without waiting for you to get your bearings.