"That's torn it!" said Lord Peter Wimsey.
A great start for a great book, featuring a character dear to many of us -- and it's pretty obvious to many if not most of us that it's a Dorothy Sayers mystery, but which one? OK --The Nine Tailors.
So here I sit, nearing the end of a manuscript and thinking ahead not only to the closing chapters and closing line of the book (which I don't generally figure out ahead of time, I like to be surprised) ... and I'm also looking ahead to the next book (which I do think about, much more than the spontaneous seat-of-the-pants ending phase). Part of my brain has already started writing that one, and the next after that and so on. I'm thinking about coming up with a great, intriguing, punchy or at least -interesting- opening line for the next book.
What makes an opening line really successful? That proverbial hook, of course - the elements that pull you into the story, catch your attention, tap your emotion or stir your curiosity ... the thing that makes you want to read on to the next sentence, next paragraph, next page and chapter....
Sometimes a great opening line will contain the whole of the book, when one looks back, and those are often most memorable. An opening line might tell you about character, situation, setting or author voice - do you want to read about this person, know more about the situation, visit that setting ... or is it just the power of the author voice, or the mystery of a story still untold, that pulls you in like a fish on a, well, hook?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. --
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
For some books, the opening sentence, separated from its author or title, is still a total giveaway (for those of us who read historical fiction and classic and historical fiction anyway, which is most of us here at Word Wenches):
Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.
-- Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini
Others not so much, even if the books are as familiar as a favorite old sweatshirt:
It was a dark and stormy night. -- A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
Did you remember that this wonderful book, which we've probably all read a zillion times, actually started that way? I didn't, until I pulled it off the shelf.
Here are a few opening lines. Take a crack at guessing them -- I know you're going to google away, and you may find some there, but not all of them ... I will give away a signed book (Susan King or Sarah Gabriel) to someone chosen at random who gets them all correct. If no one gets them all right, I'll choose a name from those who get the most correct ... between now and Tuesday night at 10 p.m. ET, when I'll post the answers.
They're not that hard - I'm sure you've read most if not all of them, you may know author voice straight away, or recognize character or setting or situation ... you may have the books sitting on your shelves. I chose lines from books that I think the majority of us will be familiar with, and hopefully that's the case. There's a variety here: historical fiction, fiction classics, mystery and romance. Some are way too easy, a couple of them not so simple...
1. It is a curious thing that at my age, fifty-five last birthday, I should find myself taking up a pen to try and write a history.
2. When the girl came rushing up the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes.
3. It was the egret, flying out of the lemon grove, that started it.
4. It began in the old and golden days of England, in a time when all the hedgerows were green and the roads dusty, when hawthorn and wild roses bloomed, when big-bellied landlords brewed rich October ale at a penny a pint for rakish high-booted cavaliers with jingling spurs and long rapiers, when squires ate roast beef and belched and damned the Dutch over their claret until their faithful hounds slumbered on the rushes by the hearth, when summers were long and warm and drowsy, with honeysuckle and hollyhocks by cottage walls, when winter nights were clear and sharp with frost-rimmed moons shining in the silent snow, and Claude Duval and Swift Nick Nevison lurked in the bosky thickets, teeth gleaming beneath their masks as they hear the rumble of coaches bearing paunchy well-lined nabobs and bright-eyed ladies with powdered hair who would gladly tread a measure by the wayside with the gallant tobyman, and bestow a kiss to save their husbands' guineas, an England where good King Charles lounged amiably on his throne and scandalised Mr Pepys (or was it Mr Evelyn?) by climbing walls to ogle Pretty Nell; where gallants roisted and diced away their fathers' fortunes; where beaming yokels in spotless smocks made hay in the sunshine and ate bread and cheese and quaffed foaming tankards.... (this one goes on for another half page, so this is half the opening sentence!)
5. On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour.
6. A gentleman was strolling down a side street in Paris, on his way back from the house of one Madame de Verchoureux.
7. The lad had the deep, burning eyes of a zealot.
8. I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house.
9. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
So there you go, just a few novel beginnings -- what's your favorite opening line in a novel?
Good luck and have fun! Answers on Tuesday evening - a random winner gets a signed book!
Susan Sarah, diving back into the WIP...
