I'm fiddling with
a new fiction project, The Fat Cat, and I really liked its
first sentence:
I hadn't seen that good-lookin' motherfucker
for almost a year when he walked in with his partner to ask me about the dead
dancer found that morning in our dumpster.
It made me think
how important first sentences are.
I've always hated
the cute little human relation's phrase: "You only have one chance to make
a first impression." But, with fiction, it is so true. It really has to
feel right. It's like the opening line of a song, and I think writing is like
music. If you get the words right and the rhythm right, you make a kind of
music in the reader's brain that resonates.
Made me go back
and look at my first sentences and comment on them.
I like the first
line for The Fat Cat I think because the phrase: ...the dead dancer found that morning in our dumpster really hits
those d sounds and creates great imagery.
Some other first
lines, in no particular order:
I had two phone calls from Don before he killed
himself.
I like the
simplicity. It tells us something important happened and that someone should
have know it was going to happen.
Cricket carefully backed her crummy car,
which needed a motor mount bolt replaced, down her cousin’s driveway.
I like this simple
introduction of this character. I think it sets the tone right away.
On my drive home from work Friday evening I
stopped at a traffic light, glanced left over at the driver in the other lane
and saw myself.
How better else to
start off this Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" type of story?
Mr. Brown closed the door on the whimpers
and walked up the stairs to take a shower.
How can you not
want to know more about Mr. Brown?
There really is a Kansas sky, wide as the
land is flat.
Lyrical intro for
a story based around a snooker game.
It wasn't until the 15th green that I
realized how alone I was.
Really? You play
15 holes of golf and then realize you are alone on the course? Must be
something else going on.
The skies were cloudy all day.
Any Kansan knows
our state song with the verse "And the skies are not cloudy all day."
Yet there are some days that are cloudy all day and that sets up the anomaly
for this loss of innocence short story.
The most important summer of my life began
with a house-shaking thunder boomer that woke me up on a Thursday night in 1958
near the end of my fifth-grade school year.
Sometimes you just
set the opening like you were laying a foundation stone.
Bob Crowley, drunk and very tired, almost
tripped over the broken toy truck before kicking it out of his way then
trudging around the side of the house to the back of a former duplex that now
housed six families of 50-some Christian souls.
This is a first
sentence as a simple, but engaging scene setter.
"I like these kinds of snows. They
cancel things out."
I don't open many
stories with dialogue, but this I thought would draw a reader in.
Fred Underwood was driving his 15-year-old,
once-white, now rust-speckled Nissan pickup six miles over the speed limit on
his way to deliver the head of a dog to the state’s vet school for rabies testing
when several things happened to him.
Another scene-setter
opening sentence, and if that head of a dog doesn't get you to read the next
sentence, nothing will.
The Volvo in the closed garage purred
quietly as it exhaled the gas that Jim Garrison inhaled.
I think this
opening line imparts so much information and tone. I really like it. The use of
exhale and inhale creates a great rhythm.
Edward Hawthorne
had no premonition of the first disturbing and later horrifying consequences
that would result from his joining the Friends of Pilley Park Garden Society.
This is my homage to the great horror writer H.P Lovecraft. I hope this is the kind of sentence that he would have written and would have loved the phrase "Friends of Pilley Park Garden Society."
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