December 2024 …
Recently I have been paying more attention to opening lines of my works. I received feedback from a professional editor, Lauren Daniels, for one of my pieces, in which she discussed this at length. Part of my reflections led me to view lessons from Salman Rushdie in the MasterClass series. In one lesson he highlighted that opening lines and paragraphs were important not just for the reader, but also the writer.
The opening few words are the keys to engage readers, inviting them to read on. These words set the tone, switch on the light of intrigue, compelling them to read on in search of expansion and revelation of the initial few words.
The quest to understand and appreciate the power of opening lines encouraged me to explore recent stories from my reading stack. Some notable beginnings include:
“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.”
– James Joyce, ‘Eveline’ in Dubliners (Penguin Classics, 2000)
“Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed. Gallaher had got on.”
– James Joyce, ‘A Little Cloud’ in Dubliners (Penguin Classics, 2000)
“Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up; but he was quite helpless.”
– James Joyce, ‘Grace’ in Dubliners (Penguin Classics, 2000)
“It wasn’t as though the farm hadn’t seen death before, and the blowflies didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.”
– Jane Harper, The Dry (Pan Macmillan Australia, 2016)
“We were waiting for things to converge.”
– Hayley Scrivenor, Dirt Town (Pan Macmillan Australian, 2021)
Of course, there are many examples throughout literature. The James Joyce examples are particularly interesting because Dubliners is an anthology of short stories, so readers have no forewarning about the direction of the impending story; the first line is all that entices readers to proceed, to seek answers to any number of questions illuminated by those first few words.
The examples by Jane Harper and Hayley Scrivenor are from full-length novels. A potential reader has probably read the blurb so there will be some expectation about the genre of the work; the first line, however, sets the tone and switches on the light of curiosity.
My recent submission to Australian Writers Centre’s Furious Fiction competition was deemed noteworthy for its opening line; the constraint applied was a four-word limit for the first sentence. I hope that it’s a sign that I am grasping the importance of opening lines. The first four words of my piece, ‘The Art of Timing’ were ‘The audience never knows.’
I applied my learning to the recent draft of my novel-in-progress, Searching. Applying the guidance from the Salman Rushdie MasterClass lesson; and reflecting on the theme of my work I arrived at:
“Life is like entropy, but time is entropy.”
A revelation for me was that, since I had drafted the novel without an intentional opening, I could now appreciate the significance of the advice. I had struggled to condense the theme of Searching into a few words, the so-called ‘elevator pitch’. For me this opening line switches on a spotlight. The arc of the novel is much clearer, and the development of the characters is more apparent. Now that I have finished the first draft, I can look forward to editing it with greater intent, further shaping it into the vision I have, and then sharing it with a wider readership.