Great Opening Lines: How to Grab Readers and Never Let Them Go

Many thanks to author and writing teacher Laura Davis for this outstanding post on how to write great opening lines.

Lots of people ask me about the ideal first line for a book, story, essay or memoir. There is no single answer to this question, although it’s essential to understand that the first line exists for one reason and one reason only: to compel the reader to read the second line. You want to hook the reader and keep him reading.

A great opening line does one or more of the following:

• Begins right in the middle of the story, putting the reader immediately into the dramatic action
• Takes us immediately into another world that we feel we must know more about
• Immediately gives us the opportunity to  escape from our own thoughts, obsessions and concerns
• Let’s us know instantly that we’re in the hands of a master storyteller
• Presents us with something unusual, quirky, amazing, shocking or emotionally gripping
• Introduces us to a fascinating, funny or idiosyncratic character
• Introduces us to an adventure, dilemma or person we simply must know more about
• Establishes a mystery that we want to solve
• Sets a compelling emotional mood or tone
• Builds suspense and tension that makes us want to know more

 I’ve been collecting great first lines for years and I often have my writing students do the same. Here are some of my all time favorites. See if you can identify which of the qualities I just mentioned are achieved by each of the following lines:

“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.”
—The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

–-Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides”When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”
 –-The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

“I was five years old the first time I ever set foot in prison.”
 –A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca

 “When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.”
 –The History of Love by Nicole Kraus

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
 — The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

“The little red light had been flashing for five minutes before Bhangoo paid it any attention. ‘The fuel gauges on these old aircraft are notoriously unreliable.”
 –Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”
–Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

 “Women on their own run in Alice’s family.”
–Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”
–Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

“Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.” 
–Undertaking: Life studies from the dismal trade by Thomas Lynch

“Mavis McPherson is locked in the bathroom and will not come out.”
–Ordinary Life by Elizabeth Berg

“On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable.”
–I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb

“If you really want to hear about 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 that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
–Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

“The first accident wasn’t my fault.” 
–“Wheels of Fortune,” Peter Hessler, The New Yorker

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
–Nineteen Eight Four by George Orwell

“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and charred.”
–Farhenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

“Do you want a big rat or a small rat?” the waitress asked. 
–“A Rat in My Soup,” Peter Hessler, The New Yorker

“On a Sunday morning in the June of my thirty-first year I open the front door of our house looking for the newspaper and find a man standing out there: stoop-shouldered, bent, blotch-skinned, his hair and beard tangled, staring with the big, wet eyes of an animal.”
–Blue River, by Ethan Canin

“It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about 20 million letters are delivered to the dead. ”                                     
–Girl with No Shadow by J. Harris

“Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.”  
— A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

“They shot the white girl first.”
–Paradise by Toni Morrison

“In the moments before, she laid a hand on his arm. ‘No matter what,’  he said, giving him a look, ‘you cannot stop.'” –Mercy by Jodi Picoult

Now see if you can find–and write–some of your own!

Laura Davis is the author of seven non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal, Becoming the Parent You Want to Be and I Thought We’d Never Speak Again. Laura’s groundbreaking books have sold more than 1.8 million copies around the world. Laura leads weekly writing groups and writing retreats in Santa Cruz, CA, as well as internationally. The Writing Retreat of Your Dreams, held in July on the cliffs of Bolinas on the wild northern California coast, is open for registration now, http://www.lauradavis.net/retreat. Each week, Laura sends out The Writer’s Journey Roadmap–a free inspirational quote and writing prompt, direct to your inbox, http://www.lauradavis.net/prompts.

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