I have a question for you about the following sentences. “I wish it never happened. I can’t change it because that was 21 years ago,” said our hero. How likely are you to go on reading that story? Opening lines of a story are important. I don’t know if you like me and browsing in a bookstore or online site like Amazon, and I am attracted by a cover or little blurb back cover. I’ll then open the novel and read the opening. That will determine whether I will spend my money on that novel.
Novels in different genres begin differently. Here’s an opening of a mystery novel. “It is a body. A helluva way to start my Monday,” Detective Smith said. A mystery novel must have a murder very near the opening. The whole premise of the book is how the hero will solve that murder.
Modern novels must start faster than, say, a nineteenth-century novel. Charles Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with this long sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” When I copied and pasted this sentence into this paragraph, my grammar checker told me it was hard to read. That is true. The convention in the 19th century was to have long sentences that people could ponder over. I’ve heard it said that they had more time to think about what they were reading. I remembered my first time reading A Tale of Two Cities. I was fascinated by the opening. I tried a much shorter version of that opening in a novel. An editor quickly crossed it off. It was “His town was not all good. His town was not all bad. His town was just a place to live.”
The next time you’re shopping for a novel or in the library looking for one, stop and look at the opening lines. Did the author succeed in drawing you into the novel’s world?
