“She was young to know such of life, and how to end it.”
Does that work? As a first line, is it intriguing, or just pompous? Does it pull the reader in or put them off?
To hell with it! What I have written, I have written: the first edit of my second draft. Let’s leave it and come back later.
If you’ve got your reader from the very beginning, you’ve got them. If you haven’t, you’re playing catch up. That’s why the first line matters. Most authors can quote their first lines word for word. They don’t forget them, just as a mother doesn’t forget the weight of her first baby. (1)
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen…’” It makes you shiver, doesn’t it?
A good first line is a gift. You don’t know where it comes from, but it comes, probably without you thinking about it. You can work one up, sweating over it and weighing every word (will I get away with “such” or do I have to go with “what she did,” which seems clumsy and dull; or should it be “so much about,” which claims more for my heroine than I want?) You can persuade yourself it’s good. That’s probably where I am with this one. But it won’t, somehow, be a cracker like the one that just came. Trust me – I’ve had both.
Gifts can come at any point when you are writing a novel. But I find that they come more quickly when you are well into it, when you‘ve got over your fears and your confidence is up. What’s more, they come when you are writing stuff fresh for the first time, not when you are redrafting or polishing. That means that the gift of a good opening line, which you really need before you’ve started writing anything, can be very rare.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife….”
A good opening line tells the reader quite a lot about the novel they are getting into. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, the reader knows at once that this is going to be humorous, ironic and about romance. It is also nice – but not necessary – if the opening somehow foreshadows the ending. That sounds as if it should really take a lot of thought, but in reality quite clever and complex ideas can fall into your head complete. (I don’t know if Austen’s universal truth was a gift or something she sweated over. She took a lot of care over her writing, so maybe she did sweat over it, even unto the weighing of each comma. But my bet is that it was a gift).
Does that mean we should put off the start of the novel until we get a really good idea for the opening line? Of course not. Ideas don’t come just because you wait for them. In fact they’re more likely to ruin away and hide. If it’s time to start, and you’ve nothing in your head for your opening sentence, then write something anyway and get on. The whole of the rest of the novel is out there waiting for you. Somewhere along the way you will start to flow. Maybe you’ll even get a late gift for that first line. But don’t count on It. From here on in, you’re catching up.
(1) Actually, authors do forget first lines and mothers do forget the weight of babies; but not as quickly as they forget other things.