Dude, you stole my current favorite. The opening of “Gone South” is just fucking amazing – and you’re right, that particular opening line is killer.

Unfortunately I don’t have any of my favorite books at hand right now – the dangers of moving a lot. Roommates. Those fuckers.

However, I will say this – opening lines in fantasy books seem much lamer in general; less about the hook and more about sounding pretentious. I don’t know what it is, but they almost always open with either:

1- So noble sounding like a twat.
2- Some farmboy sounding like an idiot.
3- Some guy dying (usually the best openings)
4- Some guy watching a battle and then -eventually- joining in.
And the absolute worst…
5 – Some guy fixing something (menial labor).

It’s not always the case, of course. This is just my observation. Fantasy books tend to unfold differently, however. A lot of them are more about the experience and the milieu than they are about the drama and the plot – at least at first. A fresh series in book one spends so much time talking about itself it can make you sick.

This is also one of the reasons I want to branch out.

I recall the opening of the Gunslinger was slick as shit though, but I don’t have the book at hand and don’t want to misquote it.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Word. Though, it took me like, four or five reads to get through the first book. After that, it was easy-breezy, but that first book I had a lot of trouble with.

Similar to Talisman, but that I never finished.

– c.

Oh and yeah, fantasy is a tricky one. But it’s why I don’t like fantasy much — I feel like it kind of becomes obsessed with its own fantastical notions and world-building rather than, y’know, telling a story. I want to hear about characters, not about a map. If I want to read history, I’ll just read, well, real history. In fact, what’s interesting about history is the people.

I packed most of my books away, but I’m sure I have some good fantasy opening lines at hand. Anybody else got any?

– c.

“We need you to kill a man.”

That’s how Heinlein opens The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Definitely feels grabby, to me.

I still have most of my books packed, including the fantasy ones, but I could run the opening line of Citizen of the Wilds past you. Give you a sneak peek, if you will, before I open up the Google Doc for y’all to rip to shreds.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I think the problem with fantasy is that it is a genre still trying to find itself. It has the basic style and tropes down, but it is doing everything it can to become unique, and not lumped in as SF/Fantasy. I think it is one of the few remaining genres where a good milieu tale can still take place though. However, exactly as you said, people get a little too trapped in that (most often mimicking Prof. Tolkien) and not enough time telling the story.

Here’s a good example – Michael Moorcock as compared to Robert Jordan. Jordan is in love with his world; he enjoys exploring it and he really enjoys describing it. Moorcock loved Elric. Well, I actually think he may have hated Elric for all that he did to him. Jordan explores his world; Moorcock explores what it means to love and hate a person. That’s why Elric is so visceral and dynamic. It is also why with Jordan you feel like you are just along for the ride. It’s a massive disconnect.

Not my blog, but I would say rip out there Josh!

@Josh:

Oooh yeah, that is a good one.

Sure, feel free to pop in the opening line(s) if you want. I probably won’t partake in the Overall Ripping, mind, but I’m excited for your progress. Have at it, lad.

– c.

@Rick:

Jordan. Ahhh, Jordan. So strong at first. I really loved that series in the beginning. And then… and then…

It swirled the drain.

And did so, book after book.

Never could finish ‘em. Sorry, Jordan. RIP.

My opinion on fantasy is that it is *treated* like a genre when really, it’s a setting.

– c.

The opening paragraph just doesn’t set the tone of the book. It sets the tone for how you approach writing what comes after it. It’s not a new fact, but I’m finding this especially true writing the micro-fiction leading into the history section of BRIMSTONE, told from the viewpoint of one of the signature characters.

What I’ve come up with so far is this:

The history of the Rio Lands begins with the End of Days. Out of blood, out of desolation and out of the Apocalypse rose our society, like a phoenix from the ashes. But the phoenix wasn’t whole, was poisoned, was sick with war and loss and mistakes. Some say all our ills can be cured, once the heathens are destroyed and the land is ours again. Others believe we need to burn once more before we can rightly call ourselves human beings again.

Me? I think we’re damned no matter what we do, so the best we can aim for is to knock a few years off our sentence in Hell for good behaviour.

It’s bound to go through a few revisions as I complete the section and go over it with a fine-tooth comb, but all I have to go on is “If this was the opener, I’d read it.”

And that’s really all you can do as you’re writing your first draft. Would you read a book that started with this sentence, this paragraph?

The book I’m reading now, Len Deighton’s SPY HOOK opens thusly: “When they ask me to become President of the United States I’m going to say ‘Except for Washington DC.’” In 19 words, I learn that the character is not thrilled with DC, and that he has something of a sardonic wit. That’s a lot for 19 words. It’s also grabbed my attention, and makes me want to read more.

Took mine. Grr. Gunslinger opening is badass.

Second choice:

“The first time I saw the man who would save the world he was sitting near the central well in Nazareth with a lizard hanging out of his mouth.”
-Christopher Moore, The Gospel According to Biff.

Ok, so the first line of the book is “You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. Trust me, I was there. I know.” but above is the first line of the narritive.

K

Here’s how it begins:

There is a moment, when one regains consciousness after being out for a period of time, when one’s senses regain their functionality in a gradual manner, instead of all at once.

@Josh:

Okay. How honest do you want me to be?

– c.

New Zealand writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s The Scarecrow (which you should read) starts out with “The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.” I have always tried to rise to that standard.

My novel started out with “The Journeyman was surrounded by ghosts.” That was the Prologue. I started Chapter One with “Vanderjack was surrounded by ghosts,” and then every Vanderjack chapter started with a single line “Vanderjack was…” opener. It worked for that book, but I don’t think I’ll be quite as structured next time.

@Cam:

That is an excellent standard (and I like the pattern you put forth in yours).

Wuzza deal with THE SCARECROW? What’s it about? Why you dig it?

– c.

“The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

(Psst. @Wood. Already put that one in the post.)

That is one of the best opening lines, though. Like, of all time. So it deserves many shout-outs.

– c.

When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean’s kitchen smelled like a Fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert.

- Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

So I’m on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! Naturally there’s a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says.

- Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

- Old Man’s War, John Scalzi

“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.” –Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

@Josh:

Okay, here goes –

I think the spirit of this is good: the waking into the story.

The problems as I see them — and others are free to disagree — are these:

a) My own cross to bear, but I am instantly put out by the construction, “There is.” It’s passive, not active.

b) It’s very wordy. It carries extra junk with it that feels largely unnecessary. “After being out for a period of time?” “Senses regain their functionality in a gradual manner?” So many boggy words to say such a simple thing.

c) I don’t know what it’s really saying to us, and I don’t know that it’s urging us forward in any meaningful way — to use @Cam’s example, “The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut,” we are instantly left with the gaping variables. Who stole the fowls? Why? Who the hell is Daphne Moran? Who killed her? Why? It’s amazing how many questions are packed into that single opening sentence. It grabs us by the wrist and drags us forth.

Were you looking to keep the intent of the opener, you could pare it down significantly: “When a man regains consciousness, his senses return gradually instead of all at once.” That’s cleaner, tighter. You want to endeavor for language that moves, flows, isn’t impeded by speedbumps. This doesn’t necessarily undo the criticism of “c,” but I think it helps.

– c.

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” – ’cause I love me some Hitchhiker’s Guide.

“They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.” – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

I have a confession to make. I just don’t worry about the hook at first. I’m one of those awful, horrible people that spew all my brain goo on the page to get it out and get it sorted for myself. So the first few pages are pure, unfiltered crap that exists so I can have it out of my system. If I spend too much time worrying about the hook at the start I’ll never get the rest of it written.

@Howard:

Hey! Great to see you again, sir. Even if it’s in the digital space. Honored to have you bop on by.

I’ve been told a number of times I have to read THE CRYING OF LOT 49, but I have not yet mustered the bravery.

– c.

@Kate:

No confession necessary — I shouldn’t worry about it. It’s not a good thing that I worry about it from the get-go, but it is a thing and it’s the baggage I carry.

Great call to Cuckoo’s Nest.

– c.

@Chuck – Thanks for your suggestions. Maybe something a bit more active, naming the protagonist right away while prompting some of the similar questions?

“Asherian had never been knocked unconscious before that day.”

Well, dammit. Beaten like a red-headed stepchild on both the opening to “The Gunslinger” and “Neuromancer”. Two others I’ve enjoyed recently are:

Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident, but he was ready to find out.

-Android’s Dream, John Scalzi (Scalzi has a unique gift for opening lines)

For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve.

-Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon

“Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.”

-Rocket Boys, Homer H. Hickham Jr.

The whole story is magical, but I love that opener.

They turned it into OCTOBER SKY.

@Jason, I was going mention the Android’s Dream opening, but I wasn’t able to find the book to quote the opening properly. I always makes me laugh when I read it.

@Ron Honestly, I was turned off by it at first, it felt a little crass. Call it an unexpected fit of prudishness. I read the first couple pages, then put the book down for a couple of months. Over the past couple of days the book has sucked me in. Last night I got to the part where Creek fires up the Dixie Flatl…I mean…the computer construct of his dead army buddy.

@Julie, OCTOBER SKY is an anagram of ROCKET BOYS. Cleverly so, as the marketing on the movie considered the original title would appeal to the wrong audience. Still fitting. It’s quite a literary auto-biographical book.

Three of the ones you mentioned are all-time favorites of mine: The Gunslinger and the two McCammon lines.

Here are some more classics:

“If you really want to hear it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all the David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
- The Catcher In the Rye, JD Salinger

“Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.”
- The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty

“The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.”
- The Thief of Always, Clive Barker

From a graphic novel:

“Rorschach’s Journal. October 12th, 1985. Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’ And I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’ They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers, and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.”
- The Watchmen, Alan Moore

And from a novel I don’t remember much about other than the first line:

“Adrienne’s tomatoes froze to death the same night that Arnie Dresser did.”
- Stephen White

Gun Monkeys, by Victor Gischler

“I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and the time I’m thinking I should have put some plastic down.”

My absolute favorite is the opening of The Haunting, which unlike most of these openings, starts a little slowly, but builds to a final phrase that is absolutely compelling:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

I forgot a couple. Also, the Stephen White above is from his novel Manner of Death.

Since somebody mentioned Scalzi above:

“I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.”
- Old Man’s War, John Scalzi

And another of my all-time favorites:

“The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.”
- Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

@Ron I never noticed that anagram before. That’s really great.

Darren I used the Old Man’s War up above. Like Jason said, Scalzi has a talent for first lines.

There are a lot of good ones, but one I remember that pretty much forced me to buy a book I wasn’t planning on buying was the beginning of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon –

“The world has teeth, and it can bite you with them any time it wants.”

I’m not a big Stephen King reader — I’ve read several of his books and usually like them, but I’m not a horror guy usually, and TGWLTG looked really short and I prefer a longer book, but I picked it up and read that and I was, like, well shit, now I have to read it.

I kinda like my opening for THE GRAVITY OF MAMMON, by the way (shamelss self promotion alert) —

“Nick Hardin never thought his first Hollywood party would be in a big-assed tent on the Chad-Sudan border, but here he was, nursing a gin and tonic, hoping he’d set things up far enough west that he was out of RPG range in case some Janjaweed punk got a bug up his ass. Fucking Mooney and his do-gooder shit.”

Agree? Disagree?

Many books that I’ve enjoyed have mundane opening lines. But now and again, an opening sentence really jumps out at me. Here are a couple of favorites:

‘To Fontana’s way of thinking, there was nothing more dishonorable than silent farting, which he had always considered sneaky in the extreme.’ (THE DEAD HORSE PAINT COMPANY by Earl Emerson)

‘John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness.’ (GOOD NEWS by Donald E. Westlake)

Hot damn, people, I go out driving for a few hours, and you bring the awesome.

@Dan — your opener to GOM is genuinely a great hook. Stabs right in your brainmeats and drags you fast.

– c.

“There is a similarity, if I may be be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of a chilly breeze and the feel of a knife’s blade, as either is lade across the back of the neck. I can call up memories of both, if I work at it. ”
Jhereg by Stephen Brust

“I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the
lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with
the city like that.”
Philip K. Dick, We Can Build You
or

Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the
earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have
grown like mushrooms around me in the dark.
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault” – tellingly, I remember this opening line more clearly than the title of the Harry Dresden books it opens, but I believe it’s “Blood Rites”

“Wonderfully, it was the boy who saw him first” – Frank Delaney, “Ireland”

“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” -Ian Fleming, “Casino Royale”

“The manticore had run, pursued by the silent and deadly dogs, up the ridge through the rhododendrons.” Elizabeth Willey’ “The Well-Favored Man”

“Cheaters were burned here” Eric Nylund, “A Game of Universe”

“Many people in the Miracle Valley had theories about why Joe Mandragon did it.” – John Nichols “The Milagro Beanfield War”

“His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.” Roger Zelazny, “Lord of Light”

“Silent as specters, the tall and the fat thief edged past the dead, noose-strangled watch-leopard, out the thick, lock-picked door of Jengao the Gem-Merchant, and strolled east on Cash Street through the thin black night-smog of Lankhmar, City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes.” Fritz Leiber, “Ill Met in Lankhmar”

-Rob D.

Neuromancer‘s the one I usually site as a favorite opening line.

I’ve got a whole story waiting behind this one opening line that I love, if I can ever get to writing the rest of it. Meanwhile, I find that the novel I have now doesn’t have a great opening line, and that vexes me.

I’m one of those writers who often finds that the right opening line is actually two or four paragraphs deep into that first page (or at the beginning of the second chapter, dreadfully), and then I have to cut away at the text to leave that jagged spur sticking out right at the front. It’s a struggle.

Fritz Leiber. Good call, man.

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
–Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

I haven’t read it, but I’ve been watching for it since I stumbled across that line.

“I don’t think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn’t really his fault.” –Dick Francis, To the Hilt

To the Hilt is so good in so very many ways.

And to jump on the bandwagon, mine.

“My God in heaven!” Weke yelped from the doorway. “Ben! You’ve got guards! That’s so cute!”

This has been my favorite opener since I first read it in 1988…

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

– James Crumley THE LAST GOOD KISS (1978)

Sad thought about the Neuromancer David pointed out to me when we were dating.

Our children won’t understand what that line means.

Turn the TV on to a dead channel. You get a bright blue screen. It’s like TV manufacturers were trying to kill Gibson’s whole dystopia.

Sooner or later the question comes up in every medical student’s career. How much shock trauma can the patient stand? Different instructors answer the question in different ways, but cut to its base level, the answer is always another question: How badly does the patient want to survive?

- “Survivor Type”, Stephen King

An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he’d bought off a pachuco at the border – right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.

- L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, James Ellroy

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. The guy said, “Screw you, buddy,” yanked his Chevy back into the stream of traffic, and roared on down to the tollbooths. Parker spat into the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked across the George Washington Bridge.

- THE HUNTER, Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)

“I’ve been told a number of times I have to read THE CRYING OF LOT 49, but I have not yet mustered the bravery.”

It’s perfectly understandable because Pynchon tends to write huge, sprawling stories with multiple diverging plot-lines and several bakers’ dozens of characters each on their own mythic quest through a universe that may be real, fantasy or drug-soaked hallucination, leading to the creation of the adjective “Pynchonian,” meaning: too much confusing crap jammed into a single book.

Though he can be poetic in brevity, as in the opening line of the nearly Pulitzer-winning Gravity’s Rainbow:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

But The Crying of Lot 49 is an especially good book, despite its massive Pynchony, and one day you will have to succumb to the curiosity that even now reaches up from rarely-visited psychologick spaces and goads you to take The Trip, or even to the simpler curiosity- to just know what all the fuss is about. I do hope you have a copy ready for that day when you simply can wait no longer.