"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
"Call me Ishmael."
No,
neither of those lines apply to my good self, and they certainly don’t belong
together. I’m about to start writing a
new book and, as so often happens to us authors, I’m faced with that blank
white page screaming for a great first line.
Romance authors are told to get the reader right into the story, but
that doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of a great opening. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way" certainly gives you a strong idea of what is
to follow, and I still believe "It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…” sets the scene pretty dang well. Yet these classic lines would be laughed
out of the editor’s office nowadays. I
can just see someone sitting over that last line thinking, when the Dickens
will this sentence ever end?
In this fast-paced life with little time for long
reads, readers have shorter attention spans —hence the popularity of novellas. Furthermore, writers of romance work within a
certain set of parameters that may, or may not, hamper them, POV being the most
obvious. No head-hopping! No author intrusion! No omniscient observer! One POV per scene! Leaving any editing skills I may or may not
have behind, I originally started Dances
of the Heart with the line, ‘They saw him at the same time.’ This somehow managed to stumble by all my
critiquers and beta-readers, who patted me on the back and told me what a great
opening it was. Not so my editor who, if
you’re worth your pound of printing paper, immediately threw the line out. Whose POV was this sentence?
And then there’s ‘Voice.’ We’re admonished to have a new, fresh,
exciting, individual, original—so on and so forth—voice. One day I’d like to do a test of readers and
have them read books by authors I know them to have already read, and see if
they can then name the author by the end of the book. Or perhaps it should be by the end of the
first sentence?
So here I am, back at my blank white page. When Jane Austen sat down to write by hand,
did she feel the same way before coming up with "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" ? Right into the story, isn’t it? With Loveland, I had to scrap seventy-two
pages before getting to "The clamor started at ten
o'clock when all the men were in their bunks." That’s an awful lot of story gone out to
pasture to get my readers where they needed to be.
So what’re your favorite first
lines? Or least favorite? Or what struggles have you had either reading
or writing a book due to the first line.
Cheer me up! I’d really like to
know.
And to read the rest of Loveland,
which was a finalist for the RONE Best American Historical, please head to
either http://www.amazon.com/Loveland-Andrea-Downing-ebook/dp/B014RUQ746/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1441679216&sr=1-1&keywords=loveland
for the eBook or, for the
print book, The Wild Rose Press: http://www.wildrosepublishing.com/maincatalog_v151/index.php?
AND FIND ME AT:
