During a recent Facebook discussion about my new book, “The Slingshot” (available now on Amazon), an awesome fellow writer named Aurora Gregory said, “I swear, opening sentences are your super power…seriously…what a start!” It’s nice to know I have a super power, though I’m not sure Opening Sentence Man (“Leaping comma splices in a single bound!”) is gonna get invited into The Avengers any time soon.
But yeah, it’s something I put a lot of thought into. Often, when I go into a story, I have an opening line in mind. I’ve been thinking about these stories for awhile before I start writing, planning out the characters and plot, so something typically comes to mind. Here’s the first sentence from “The Slingshot:”
I was fifteen when I killed that girl who lived up the street.
I spent awhile thinking about this one. On one hand, it kills the suspense of the girl dying later in the story. So I questioned that. What I had to balance out was my desire to grab the reader’s attention, and my desire to have them floored by the girl’s death. In the end, I decided that the first-person confession to murder was too personal and too intriguing not to use. I also liked the fact that it set the protagonist up as being 15 at the time, which adds to the intrigue. The hope is that a reader can’t put it down after that first sentence. And, being a short story, by the time they get to the part about the girl, hopefully they’re fully invested and won’t have any trouble reading the rest.
I think it’s important to grab the reader’s attention right from the outset … particularly if nobody knows who the hell you are, and lots of people who read your stuff are basically taking a chance on you. Virtually nobody is picking up my books because they’ve heard so much about Jeff Haws books, and now they want to join the club of people who’ve read them. Nobody’s gonna slog through a really difficult-to-read book of mine just so they can say they finished it. My anonymity means I’ve got to give them a payoff, and do it quickly, or I’m likely to lose their attention.
Here’s the first line from my novel, “Killing the Immortals” …
“Does she have a pulse?” Richard was scrambling out of the back seat and around to the driver’s side door, which was crumpled from the impact with the truck that disappeared quickly down the highway.
Interestingly, this is a completely different beginning than I initially wrote for that book. I added on and changed so much about the first few chapters that it’s almost unrecognizable from the original draft I wrote. I believe the original first line was written from Richard’s perspective, and this is what it was, if my memory serves me correctly …
“For my 123rd birthday, I got a Bible, a set of knives, and a bullet to the head. Only the knives were a surprise.”
What I liked about this was it set up that people were living a long time (123rd birthday), and that someone could get a bullet to the head and live long enough to tell the story.
The key to me is getting the reader to ask questions that can only be answered by continuing to read. If I can get the reader doing that, I feel like I’ve got a good shot at pushing them forward to the next page and the next chapter. If I can get them to do that, hopefully I can get them to the end, and then maybe to another book because they enjoyed that one.
That’s always my goal. Get you to the next page. Give you a reason to keep reading. That’s my responsibility. And that starts from the first sentence. As a sneak peak, here’s a look at the first sentence from my next novel, at least as it currently stands …
Her lips wrapped tightly around the pistol’s steel barrel, Theresa shifted her weight from her left knee as it began to ache against the frost-laded concrete on a cold February evening.
My hope is that the reader asks how Theresa got herself there. Why is there a gun in her mouth? Why is she on her knees? Is she going to die? What’s going to happen? Interested in finding out? The only way is to actually read the book … because I’m sure not gonna tell you. One day pretty soon, you’ll get the chance.
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