First sentences
by phill
Inspired by ArtsJournal’s
blog post about Nabokov’s first sentence portraiture (reached via @Meanjin), I decided to engage in a little exercise. You’re all welcome to participate, and the rules are simple. Take however-many-you-like pieces of writing that you have lying around, and post their first sentences. Don’t just include the ones you think are good, give us a broad sampling. This is a learning exercise after all.
Here’s mine (culled from a selection of pieces that aren’t currently being sent around the place)
- “The firm is interested in hiring an enthusiastic graduate architect to work on the design and implementation of projects addressing residential, commercial, and industrial needs.”
- My girlfriend Lisa and I had just broken up.
- If everything went according to David’s plan, March the 5th would be the day he walked down the street from his house with nothing at all.
- It was a moonless night, and the shadows swarmed around Cian’s boots as she ran through the forest.
- George’s fingers skirt the rim of the lubricant jar before reaching down to coat the rubber methodically.
- It was approximately half-past eleven on a Saturday evening and Brendan was thinking about his cat.
- We began our search for the particles at a public bar, scanning the length of the room and recording the apparent personalities of each visitor.
I think you’ll agree that there are very few entries in that list that achieve a portrait such as Nabokov did. We are constantly being told that the first line of any story must be a hook to catch the reader’s eye (and here I’m reminded of Margaret Atwood’s lovely poem), but perhaps only three of the above are hooks, introducing an idea that isn’t qualified within the same sentence (for the record, I’m thinking of 3, 5, and 6). Taken out of context, there isn’t much to the rest of them, appearing as mere statements of a fact. I can see the reader in my mind’s eye, arching a perfect eyebrow and asking me very pointedly, “So?”.
Well, so, I’ve got to think a little harder about my first sentences. How about you? Leave a comment or if you indulge in a similar post, link me through. I’d love to see what people might learn from this exercise.
No related posts.
Comments
I love going through first sentences. They always appear so simple, but the masters have so much going on than just ‘here is what happened first’. Here is a sample of mine:
1. When a shopping centre is dying, its patronage slipping away, it is referred to as a greyfield.
2. You flick to news, to sports, to movies, to talk-back, to art, to finance, to lifestyle, to real life and then back to something better on TV.
3. The first shell tore through the living quarters.
4. I was crossing the desert.
5. The Captain opened his eyes and the shattered face of a street lamp jerked into view above him.
I feel a bit the same as you. Most of my first sentences say only one thing, and leave little for the reader to be intrigued about. Whereas someone like Nabokov says many things in the same space. I think new writers get hung up on how their first sentence sounds, and forget to go back later and check what it says about their entire story.
A few of my favourites:
Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O’Brien:
I am afraid.
Someone is coming.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus:
My mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday.
High-Rise, by JG Ballard:
Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.
1. After more than a year’s long journey through Outspace, Josiah Grey set his sea-legs on concrete and smelled the city, full of steam and piss and the spice of perfume, acid chemicals raised into the air.
2. I’ve been dreaming of another world.
3. It seems like days, weeks, months I’ve been on this transit spiraling endlessly towards the heart of the city.
4. Eugene Polycarp sat at a desk in a colorless 10X10 room, spindle-thin fingers shuffling an immense stack of papers and determined stare on his bony, twisted face.
5. When the inventor built the clock, he did not know that it had already been invented.
I’m actually pretty happy with all of these, especially the ones where I crammed all those words in, but I spend a lot of time crafting my prose. Sometimes I think too much emphasis is put on first sentences. I want to find a good 1st sentence that will hook me into writing the rest of the story, but a lot also depends on that 1st paragraph/page/chapter. First lines are far less important in longer works; I’ve read novels that took me a few chapters to really get drawn into, but the way things unfolded over the course of the story made it worth reading.
Some of my favorite 1st lines? Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “the Trial.” Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Men.” I love the poetry of the 1st chapter in Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities.”
Good stuff! I’m so not game to do this with my own firsts. I like number 5 though ;) One trick I learned in a creative writing subject was to take the paper and fold it down to cover maybe the first third of your first page to find your ‘real’ first sentence. I tried it and it works! Sometimes. Because we put so much thought into that first and other opening sentences that we don’t realise how much unnecessary words are in there. I dunno, try it and tell me what you think
@Mark: I loved your 1., partly because it’s intriguing and partly because I have an obsession with shopping centres within stories. I forgot to include my favourites, but I think possibly the best first sentence I have ever read was from Alison Sebold’s ‘Almost Moon’: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’
@AR: Yours definitely have more of an intriguing quality about them, if only because with their futuristic bent we want to know how these things are possible! I agree that first paragraphs are usually a better indication of quality than first sentences; then again I’ve been known to read half a book in the hope of being hooked.
@Elena: Ooh, nice tip! I’ll definitely give it a try in the future.
Meh, any first sentence with my name in it works for me. :D
Although thinking about it, if it was a moonless night, how can there be shadows?
[...] I’m just going to post a short one today. The following exercise I picked up from Phill over at Tooth Soup. Phill I assume got it from Mehujael, who got it from Irad, who got it from Enoch. The idea is to [...]