How to Start a Novel

We have a great game that we play when we go up there with friends, a bit like the Dictionary game/Balderdash. Everyone peruses the shelves a picks out a promising book. Then, one round at a time, someone gives the title of their book, reads the back, and maybe reads a few choice paragraphs from the middle or end, giving everyone a sense of the book.

Then everyone writes down an opening line on a slip of paper. The book-holder writes down the real first line. The slips are shuffled and the book-holder reads each of them, preferably dramatically. Everyone votes on the real one.

Writing first sentences is such a delightful exercise. And of course with genre fiction everyone has the license to go completely over the top. With the right group of people it's utterly hilarious, and it's amazing how frequently someone writes a sentence that seems better than the original.

(A random one I recall: a pot-boiled detective noir novel, involving a murder victim named Sunday: "If Sunday had known on Monday that on Tuesday she'd be dead, she would have made several different choices.")

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's opening line from One Hundred years of Solitude was enough for me to pick up the book. Personally, I feel that this is one of the best openings of any book I've read.

It can be much easier to start your writing a bit further in, where you have a rough idea of a scene, and letting the characters and the action work themselves.

In fact, this is a good way to create bridges through tricky parts, where you know the current scene, the scene after the next one but no idea how it got there. Instead of struggling with the blank page for too long, skip the unknown scene and keep writing. And later on you'll likely have a good plan for filling in the bridge.

It's much easier to go back and fill in the gaps when you've figured out the 'voice' of your novel, and have a good understanding of the characters and their quirks.

You may also realise you can cut so many of the gratuitous scenes that were useful in your mind for connecting A to B in terms of worldbuilding and plot progression, but are extraneous to the reader.

Here's one of my favorites, from Karain: A Memory:

We knew him in those unprotected days when we were content to hold in our hands our lives and our property. None of us, I believe, has any property now, and I hear that many, negligently, have lost their lives; but I am sure that the few who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs—sunshine and the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume as of land breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights; a signal fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff; great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of white surf thunders on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the reefs; and green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level of a polished sea, like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel.

Edit: if you listen to the audiobook, you can really hear the beauty of his language. Especially the intro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp9GT76NPaE

And so I find many books have great openings, but get boring in 2nd chapter.

So if Im in a store, I always start browsing a book after the 1st chapter-- that gives me a better idea of what the book will be like.

And this advice-- open a book with a "killer" opening isnt always true. When I was doing a writing course with Dean Smith, he had us analyse the openings of our favourite book. For me, at that time, was Jurassic Park.

If you havent read the book, the first chapter is leisurely and slow, talking about a minor character who feels bored at her job as an island doctor. But that chapter is masterfully written, as the very last line hints that there is trouble in paradise, and sets up the main story.

Compared with the movie, which starts in the middle of action, but the scene is dark and confusing, and I always skip it on repeat viewings.

“The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.”

A Wizard of Earthsea

And here is an advice from Anton Chekhov: “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”

So many of them are interesting and/or hilarious. A few of my favorites:

I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.

I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.

I wish someone would make a novel out of these!

[0]: https://aiweirdness.com/post/189170306297/how-to-begin-a-nov...

For what it's worth, I considered quoting Plague's first sentence here (if it were somehow fitting or interesting), and as I googled it up, I found an article devoted to this very subject: https://theconversation.com/first-sentences-establish-a-cont...

I didn't find Plague's opener to be particularly inspiring after all, but there are a few other examples.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night

Having said that, surprising opening is a thing. For instance the greatest Polish patriotic epic poem starts with: "O Lithuania, my country, thou Art like good health;". Which nowadays is kind of unexpected...

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

> The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose.

Slaughterhouse-five

> All this happened, more or less.

The House of God

> Except for her sunglasses, Berry is naked.

Everything is Illuminated:

> It was March 18, 1971, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River.

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" - Stephen King's The Gunslinger

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/lwf5m4/favorite_op...

I’d love to know a first line amazing enough that one would ignore their own child?

Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent.

Then it launches into a modern high-tech version of Heart of Darkness.

Never have I done that. Most people will give it at least half a chapter.

A typical reader will already have an idea of what they're getting themselves into - from being familiar with the author, reviews, or blurb. They're not going to put your book down just because your opening isn't something clever.

You don't want readers to think about how clever you are anyways. You want them to be immersed in your story, if a story is what you're selling.

The first chapter, like any other part of your story, should be interesting, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with starting it as you would chapter five.

"To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs"

PS: it's not exactly an opening line, it's a dedication. But I think it performs the same function in this case.

This guy not only has amazing stories and characters, but he is able to crank them out soooo fast.

A fabulous first line, from The Crow Road by Iain Banks. Doubly good for me since a friend asked me for a recommendation for an interesting read, and I later discovered that he had sent it, unread, to his grandmother for her birthday.

"It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter."

IMO the backside of the book should be written in the style of the novel rather than a marketing pitch. Let the reader get a glimpse of the story from the main character’s perspective in their own words.

Mindblowing.