the first line of a novel
It's an art form – and one of the hardest ones out there to master. (Also, I'm really mad about the latest AI developments in writing.)
I’ve spent a lot of this week oscillating between utter terror/existential dread over the advent of AI (especially this Twitter announcement by Sudowrite, who inexplicably seem to really believe they’re helping writers instead of giving lazy hacks the tools to replace them in service of chasing a fast buck), and being massively heartened by a seemingly industry-wide team-up to say, actually, no, nobody wants this except people who don’t understand what writing really is.
Anyway, I could rant for hours about this whole thing, and I doubt that’s what you’re here for. So let’s talk about the other thing I’ve been thinking about, which is first lines.
I truly believe that while the first page is the chance to hook the reader, the first line to tells readers how the writer is going to tell that story. Is this narration going to be introspective, pragmatic, forceful, lyrical, etc? First lines don’t always do this, but in my experience they usually do. I’m always on the look-out for first lines that make my whole body go !!!, and so I thought I’d share a few of my favourites with you today.
First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
- The Overstory, Richard Powers
The Overstory is, quite simply, the best book I’ve ever read. This may change, I’m currently reading Powers’ second novel, Bewilderment, and I already think it might nudge its predecessor out of the top spot. I actually nearly went with Bewilderment’s first line instead of The Overstory’s, but the real sucker-punch on Bewilderment’s first page comes at the end of the first paragraph so I felt like it would be cheating. Technically this first line is two sentences, but they feel so much like the same thought to me I’m counting them.
Anyway, if you’ve read The Overstory, this first line tells you so much about it without telling you anything you didn’t already know. Nothing. Big Bang. A universe. But it does so much more than tell you the source of everything: it lets you know that this is a book with themes so much bigger than one person. This is a book about the universe and life and where we all come from. It even implies (although perhaps only retrospectively, since I’m looking at it from the viewpoint of someone who’s already read the book) that it’s going to be about where we’re going.
It also promises you that Powers’ is a beautiful, masterful writer. He’s unafraid of chopping his sentences up where strict grammar rules would tell you not to, and he knows exactly how to manipulate language to make it hurt wonderfully. (It’s a promise he delivers on, by the way. The Overstory is the only book where I’ve had to stop to mark out passages I found particularly beautiful.) Goddamn this book deserved its Pulitzer.
They say you can sail a thousand miles along the island chain of the Myriad, from the frosty shores of the north, to the lush, sultry islands of the south.
- Deeplight by Frances Hardinge
I could have picked any Frances Hardinge book really, because I am obsessed with everything she does. She’s the only writer I know who creates these immense, fascinating, teeming fantasy worlds with eclectic concepts far beyond most of our wildest imaginations – and then she explores them in a single book and she’s done. Next thing. If I could pick any writer to invite to a dinner party it would be her.
Deeplight in my opinion is the strangest and most beautiful of all her books, and I love this first line because it told me right off that I was in for another amazing setting. It’s so immediately evocative and it establishes the setting as crucial to this story (the way it usually is in a Hardigne book). It also sets this up as a fairy tale-esque story with the first words, “They say…” – the whole thing is almost disclaimed in this way, like even though we’re going to listen to this narrator and go on his journey with him, we can’t really be sure it all truly happened like this. This is a dream of a place, a thousand-times-told folktale passed from mouth to mouth. And I adore it.
By the time Alex managed to get the blood out of her good wool coat, it was too warm to wear it.
– Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
Ninth House was very hit and miss with a lot of my reader-friends, but I loved it. With this single sentence, Bardugo does a multitude of things:
Establishes our lead character, Alex.
Lets us know she isn’t well-off – she has one good coat that she needs badly enough to go to the bother of trying to get blood out of it.
Also that she’s resourceful; she actually manages to do it. And getting blood out of wool is a bitch.
Gives us our rough timeline: early in the year, going out of Winter/early Spring into late Spring/summer.
Sets up a massive question: why did she have blood in her coat? What happened? The stakes are immediate. Our curiosity is roused.
Shows us some of what Alex is going to be like as a narrator. She’s pragmatic and sardonic, someone with no squeamishness who’s used enough to blood and/or trauma to be more annoyed about being slow with sorting it out than the blood itself.
This is a truly masterful first line in my opinion, and I completely understand why she was recently given an unheard-of seven-figure, twelve-book deal. I’m not even really envious because Bardugo is just that good.
Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist.
– A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan
If you’ve watched enough of my TikToks, you probably are unsurprised that I’m including Marie Brennan here. The Memoirs of Lady Trent series is just spectacular, okay. Take it up with whoever. I am going to keep referencing them because they just occupy that large a space in my imagination.
I love this first line. Like Ninth House, it tells us so much: we are entering a first-person narration, that narrator is old and has lived a full life, this is written as a memoir (an unusual angle for a fantasy novel), that we are in a time period where post is still the dominant form of communication – oh, yeah, and tacked on the end like it’s not important, dragons exist here. And that’s the genius of it. The very casualness of how Lady Trent talks about dragon naturalism lets us know that this is entirely ordinary in her world. Dragons are nothing particularly remarkable to the people that inhabit it, and indeed they are commonplace enough that there is an entire academic discipline dedicated to the study of them like there is to, say, the study of butterflies.
For me, this raised so many questions that I had to read on. What are the dragons like? Where do they live? What is this world where they’re so ordinary? Who are you, narrator? Why do people write to you? Why are you writing your memoirs? You must be someone important or interesting enough to warrant it. Tell me more. I need to know.
That’s ultimately what every writer is trying to do, I think. Get readers asking just enough questions that they have to read on, but not so many that they check out immediately. It’s a fine art. Not easy to master.
I could go on, as my list is long, but I think a lot of these speak for themselves. I’ll wrap up with a few more favourites – and if you’ve read this far, let me know a first line that you particularly love! Whether it’s for its beauty, its mystery, or just because you feel like it encapsulates the story that follows it so well.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
– The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret AtwoodMy name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in the Hunger Games.
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Suzanne CollinsAll happy families are more or less dissimilar, all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).
– Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir NabokovNobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.
– Boy Snow Bird, Helen Oyeyemi
Thanks for reading,
Ellie x