Opening Lines

Aaarrrggghhh!!!

Opening lines make me want to tear my hair out. I can't tell you how many cups of coffee and bags of M&M's it takes for me to produce a good opening line.



Writing a great opening line may be an art form. Oh, most of us can come up with a clever string of words, but often the sentence doesn't truly fit our book. We may even try to change the book to match the line, because we love it so much. For this reason, it's important to avoid growing a distorted attachment to an opening line.

After being blessed with the opportunity to read many first lines by fellow unpublished authors, I'm going to share with you a little secret I've discovered.

Often, a writer's best line will not be the opening line or even be on the first page. It's usually buried in a paragraph somewhere on the first or second page. Why do I know this? Because the line jumps out at me. I instantly think, now this is the opener.

Why can't we see this for ourselves? I think it boils down to being too close to our story. We think we've found the perfect sentence, but we're wrong, oh, how wrong! An outside pair of eyes can be crucial to making sure the best line for our book shows up front and center.

The process of analyzing other writer's opening lines has made me adept at finding my own buried best line.

And while we're on the subject of first lines, I have to share my misguided idea of writing the opening line to my fifth book. My first four books were written in quick succession without the help of a single craft book. (Nothing to be proud of, my friends.) These beauties reside in my closet where they belong. But after I received my first, and might I add deserved, rejection, I realized for book five I needed to learn this pesky thing called the writing craft.

Did I get overzealous and try to cram too much in?

Yep. So book five needed a spectacular opener, one that would employ all of the splendid craft techniques I'd picked up over the year. When I finished,the line could definitely be described as memorable, after all, I'd thrown enough words in to create an entire paragraph. Lesson learned? Longer doesn't equal better.

Turns out, the shorter sentences I'd used pre-learning-the-craft proved a good judgment call!

What makes an opening line jump out at you? Do you have any opening line pet peeves?

Join me on Friday to set one goal!

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