The Gateway To The Story: Opening Lines

Zoë Sharp

This is an update of a blog I originally wrote four years ago, although all the books mentioned are the latest publications by my fellow blog mates.

I’m fascinated by opening lines. It’s a question I always ask other writers: “What’s the opening line of your last/latest book?” and it’s amazing how often they can’t quite seem to remember, or maybe they’re just a little embarrassed to be able to quote it verbatim off the top of their head.

For me, nothing is harder to write than that first sentence. I’m reminded of the famous quote—can’t remember who originally said it—that goes: ‘After three months of continuous hard labour, he thought he might just have a first draft of the opening line.’ Always gets a laugh, but the terrible thing is that it’s not far off the truth.

I just can’t go forwards until I have a start I’m happy with. Maybe it’s because when I pick up a book by a new or new-to-me author, the first thing I read is the opening paragraph. It says everything about the pace, the style, the voice. It basically tells me if I want to go on with the rest of the story, almost regardless of anything else.

So far, I’ve been lucky and I’ve rarely been asked to change the start of a book. That doesn’t mean I haven’t done so, though. For both my first standalone, THE BLOOD WHISPERER, and the latest one, DANCING ON THE GRAVE, I added new prologues to tie the start of the book more firmly into both the backstory and the story to come, but in both cases, the opening chapter one remained the same.

When I co-wrote AN ITALIAN JOB with John Lawton, I penned the opening scene. It was Lawton who suggested I swap the order of the first two paragraphs, and I agreed with him, so, the story starts: 

‘The jolt of startling recognition had happened so regularly over the last twenty years it no longer surprised him, even though he knew most of the people he saw—those he thought he saw—were dead.’

Generally speaking, I’m pretty easygoing about edits. If my editor says something needs altering or cutting, and I don’t have a really good reason for that scene to stay, it goes. That came from years of non-fiction writing for magazines, where you couldn’t get away with lying full length on the floor and beating your fists into the carpet, wailing, just because somebody wanted you to cut half your deathless prose to fit around the pretty pictures.

But I hate it when people mess with the rhythm of what I’ve written for no good reason. I put commas in for their original purpose—to tell the reader when to pause, where to place the emphasis within a sentence so it reads with the same cadence as it had in my head when I wrote it.

A few years ago I did a short story for a particular magazine. It had to be to a specific length and I delivered it precisely 32 words over, which I thought was pretty close to target. The story was entitled ‘The Getaway’ and my original opening went:

‘Lenny Bright sat opposite the Holland and Seagrave Building Society in a gunmetal Honda Accord with the engine running. He hadn't taken his eyes off the front door for twenty minutes, and right at that moment he would have sold his soul for a cigarette.’

But when the magazine arrived, to my surprise the editor had changed the opening to:

‘Sitting opposite the Holland and Seagrave Building Society Lenny Bright kept the engine of his gunmetal Honda Accord running. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the front door for twenty minutes, and he would have sold his soul for a cigarette.’

Not a great deal of difference, I grant you, but enough to change the whole character of the opening, the pace, the style, everything. Lenny’s a getaway driver, as the title suggests, so it’s not his Honda, for a start. And somehow the ‘right at that moment’ seemed an important point to make about Lenny’s sudden craving for nicotine. Quite apart from anything else, it just reads WRONG to me, and I wish they’d asked me before they messed with it—or even told me beforehand that they intended to—but there you go. Argh!

When I was kicking around the idea for this post, I went and looked up the opening lines for my fellow Everywhere Murderers, and when you look at them all, one after another, you really get a feel for the eclectic styles of this highly talented group of writers.

Annamaria Alfieri—THE IDOL OF MOMBASA (Vera & Tolliver #2)

‘As always, the dhow approached Malindi harbor under cover of darkness on the night of the new moon. A tall African man stood in the bow of the boat.’

Cara Black—MURDER ON THE LEFT BANK (An Aimée Leduc Investigation)

‘Pale afternoon light filtered into Éric Besson’s wood-paneled office as Monsieur Solomon untied the twine that bound together a bulging old notebook. “We were prisoners together in a POW camp,” Solomon said, wheezing, as the lawyer took hurried notes.’

Leye Adenle—WHEN TROUBLE SLEEPS (An Amaka Thriller #2)

‘“Have you ever been on a private jet?” Chief Adio Douglas stretched his hand over Titi’s shoulder in the back of the Mercedes S-Class.’

Sujata Massey—THE WIDOWS OF MALABAR HILL (A Mystery of 1920s India #1)

‘On the morning Perveen saw the stranger, they’d almost collided. Perveen had come upon him half-hidden in the portico entrance to Mistry House.’

Caro Ramsay—THE SIDEMAN (An Anderson & Costello Thriller #10) 

‘Costello pulled her car up outside the big house. It looked cold and dead in the bright winter sunshine, rays glinted off the ivy-covered slates giving a sparkle to the bricks of the red chimneys.’

Michael Stanley—DEAD OF NIGHT

‘Michael Davidson wiped the sweat off his face, irritated that his hand was unsteady. He’d been following the white pickup for almost two hours.’

Zoë Sharp—DANCING ON THE GRAVE (A CSI Grace McColl and DC Nick Weston Crime Thriller)

‘It is a bad day to die…a perfect one to kill.’

Jeffrey Siger—AN AEGEAN APRIL (A Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery #9) 

‘The northeastern Aegean island of Lesvos, a place of quiet beauty, storied history, and sacred shrines, had long drawn the attention of tourists, though never quite the hordes of off-islanders that descended each summer onto some of its much smaller, but far more notorious, Cycladic neighbors to the southwest.’

Susan Spann—BETRAYAL AT IGA (A Hiro Hattori Shinobi Mystery)

‘Hiro Hattori leaned into the wind that swept down the hill and across his face. He pulled his kimono tighter and glanced at the Portuguese priest beside him.’

All very different, all fascinating. They make me want to know more about all these stories, just from the opening lines. Not only that, but I’m intrigued to know if these were the original opening lines for each book? Were there lots of ideas kicked around? Did an editor disagree with your preference and you had to make a major change?

But what makes a good opening line? What’s your personal favourite as a reader? How do you decide on one as a writer? The openings of some of the most famous novels vary wildly, from the famous 'Call me Ishmael' of MOBY DICK to the incredible opening sentence from Montgomery’s ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, which weighs in at a hefty 149 words, beating Dickens’ positively lightweight opener to A TALE OF TWO CITIES by a solid thirty. Wow, people must have had the breath control of a whale in those days.

But it’s not just the opening lines that intrigue me, it’s what they represent. They are the jumping-off point for the whole tale. Books never start at the beginning of the story, and deciding exactly where to invite your reader to join you on that journey is an enormously difficult choice, because it’s vital they arrive at the right point to engage their interest, intrigue them, make them unable to leave that bookstore without your book clutched under their arm. But you can’t cheat, either. You can’t open the book with a situation so outrageous that, when the explanation’s finally revealed, it can never live up to the set-up.

When I wrote the opening for the soon-to-be-released prequel to my Charlie Fox series, TRIAL UNDER FIRE, it was one that came to me immediately and it never changed:

‘The pair of helos came in low and dark over the ravine. One minute they were a faint whump-whump in the distance, the next they were right on top of us. Two sudden, snarling silhouettes, each big as a truck, blotting out the stars.’

I always like to hit the ground running and, for me, that’s what this opening does. Sets the scene, the pace, and the danger, right from the start. It’s the rhythm of the words as much as the words themselves, and the alliteration in the last sentence was absolutely intentional. This story takes place way before Charlie became a bodyguard—back when she was still a regular soldier in the regular army. Back before she acquired her killer instinct.

I quite often go for flash-forward opening chapters with the Charlie Fox series, but this isn’t one of those. In fact, apart from a couple of flashbacks to show her home life, the story is fairly linear. It was quite a contrast with the current series book I’m working on at the moment, which hops back and forth over about a six-week period to explain how Charlie finds herself walking unarmed into an ambush on a quiet country road in New Jersey.

When I look back at the last time I posted on this subject, I find the sentence: ‘And boy, I hope I never enter one of those bizarre alternate realities where fictional characters spring to life, because if that ever happens I swear Charlie Fox is going to seek me out and beat the crap out of me for what I put her through, book after book.’

Things haven’t been any easier for Charlie in the intervening time, and the latest story isn’t exactly a day at the beach for her, either. But then, that would make life a little dull, wouldn’t it?

This week’s Word of the Week, is adoxography, meaning fine writing in praise of trivial or base subjects, or eruditely praising worthless things.