On Writing: Opening Lines
The right opening line can make or break a work of fiction — occasionally at the same time.
The right opening line can make or break a work of fiction. It’s the hook that draws us in and presents the narrative question the rest of the text promises to answer. It is a vital element of worldbuilding in the way it sets the tone of the story.
The opening line of 1984 has to be one of the best introductions to tone in any book ever written.
By now we are well familiar with the basic premise of Orwell’s masterwork. The book is set in an alternative timeline where the government has absolute control over everything: installing listening devices in your homes, rewriting history, encouraging hatred as a form of social engineering — even manipulating thought and language so that it becomes impossible to say anything against the ruling party because there are literally not the words for it.
It’s a messed up world: eerie and yet a hair’s breadth away from our own. It’s strange and yet frighteningly familiar.
And Orwell introduces that perfectly in his opening line:
It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Everything’s fine: it’s a nice, bright day; It’s at a lovely time of year when everything seems fresh and new; it’s a civilised age with striking clocks giving it a sense of order and predictability and then, right there at the end of the sentence, just as we are starting to feel comfortable in this familiar setting, we get hit with the weirdness of clocks striking thirteen. It’s the familiar overridden by the unfamiliar; it’s the unnatural efficiencies and order of the 24 hour clock imposed on the uniquely British Big Ben; it’s the threat of soviet values and five-year-plans threatening good old reliable British traditions. And it sets the tone for everything to come.
The opening line has to be the most heavily edited part of all of my own writing. The number of hours I have spent starting at those first few words is more than I care to count. I edit, re-edit, delete the whole thing, scrap the entire paragraph and then add it back in realising that the first version was probably the best of all of them.
Take the first line from my eco-fantasy Kingdom. I wanted to have the sense right from the start that this story is about the entry of something new into an established order. I also wanted to let my reader know this world was one step removed from our own — familiar and yet strange. I wanted a sense that the logic of this world didn’t quite fit with our own.
Here’s what I came up with.
There were newcomers in the treeless forest.
I was happy with that at first. It was familiar yet strange, with the sense that something in this world was about to change. A few chapters later, I made the mistake of coming back to it.
This is when things started to go wrong.
I realised that although it had the tone and simple worldbuilding I was after, my focal point was fuzzy. The first chapter is from the perspective of a couple of buzzards watching these newcomers gradually moving closer to the nest but I had no mention of this perspective in that line. I was worried that my reader might identify more with the newcomers than the buzzards so I tried to introduce them into the opening line. After a few drafts, I came up with this:
The buzzards had been aware of the newcomers for a moon or more, their presence drifting over the scentscape like pollen in summer.
I was happy with that for a time. It gives a clear focal point from the perspective of the buzzards and includes a nice little bit of imagery as well. I even had it like that when I started sending off the work to agents. But now I’m looking back at it thinking it’s lost something of the mood of the original line. The new one puts everything in order, fixes the perspective and adds some nice imagery but it’s the tone! The tone is lost.
Tone is life.
So how do I fix this?
In this case, I did the easy thing and put them together. Get the tone nailed in the first line and the details and perspective in the next. Get the reader to feel before they see.
There were newcomers in the treeless forest. The buzzards had been aware of them for a moon or more, their presence drifting over the scentscape like pollen in summer.
I get the mood in the first line and fix the perspective in the second. And it had to be that way. I had to go back and resurrect the original opening line because telling a good story is never about telling the reader what happened; it’s about feeling what happened.
So what do you think?
- Do you prefer tone or perspective in an opening line?
- What are your favourite opening lines?
- What really gets you hooked?
The first book of Kingdom has been recorded as a free audiobook podcast. You can find links to your podcast platform of choice here.