First Lines

The first lines of a story are often the hardest to write. Many times the first paragraph in a published novel are last words the author writes. They come back to it. Tweak it. Move sentences around. Cut paragraphs. Spend way too much time on it, trying to find the magic formula to draw the reader in.

It can be a tricky balance--you need to be interesting enough to keep them reading, but you also need to make sure they get enough information up front that they're not totally lost as to what's happening to who and where and why. It needs to set the tone for the story. Witty? Serious? Thoughtful? Suspenseful? Maybe even the time period and the setting. Or maybe just create enough of a "huh?" moment that they have to keep reading to find out what you meant.

No wonder I like to skip this part.

Here are some "official" greatest first lines, compiled by some literary group.

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
~ from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, of course.

2. Call me Ishmael.
~ from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
~ from 1984 by George Orwell

4. 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.
~ from City of Glass by Paul Auster

5. They shoot the white girl first.
~ from Paradise by Toni Morrison

6. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
~ from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

7. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
~ from The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

8. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
~ from The Tin Drum by G nter Grass

9. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
~ from Crash by J.G. Ballard

10. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
~ from Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Do you agree with this selection? Do they make you want to keep reading? Which one do you like best?