What makes a great opening line?

Post by pimlottc » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

ckastner wrote: post #39

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Post by stavros » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

pklausler wrote: post #53

stavros wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already in the article (yours is two sentences though).

Both of the first two sentences need to be there, I felt. (Camus uses very short sentences in the first parts of the book.) In the last part, the apparent lack of emotion in the face of his mother's death is used in evidence for Meursault's uncaring nature at the trial.

Post by Melatonic » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

Post by sophacles » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #51

jl6 wrote: post #33

See also https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. The whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Second sentence: "Suddenly a shot rang out." Which explains my (never actually submitted) entry: "He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, and especially the kind of dork who would presume that she would marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot a ring right out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the rin…

Post by shagie » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #7

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”