Your father is about to ask me the question.
What makes a great opening line?
121–130 of 202 posts
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#122“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Unfortunately, television is digital now and dead channels are just black.
An iconic opening line indeed!
Doubly interesting because no-one, not even Gibson himself, can tell what visual imagery he was thinking of with that description. I always thought it was "gray snow/static", but TVs didn't always show that (they certainly don't today, as you pointed out). Depending on the era, dead channels alternated between black, static snow, blue, etc; when Gibson was talking dead channels it wasn't static snow.
Gibson has contradicted himself on different interviews about this. See replies and discussion for this question: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/163304/770
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#123Does anyone know of a book wherein the last line is the same as the first? In the sense of making the book self-referencing? Something along the lines of, “And so it is with you.”
The first words of Finnegans Wake by Joyce are actually the middle of a sentence that begins at the end of the book.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iain Banks? Pretty sure it is, can’t remember the title…
Yeh, The Crow Road. I met him once working a book signing. He was brilliant, incredibly down to earth, very very funny and an all round good bloke. His books have kept me enthralled, especially Dead Air and Complicity. Helluva read.
I’m a big fan of his Culture series. I love reading and rereading those books.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#125"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again." -- Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
I love the iambic hexameter
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#126“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#127I own a collection of iconic short stories, the Pocket Book of Short Stories (apparently first published in 1941) which has an interesting preface reviewing the strengths and difficulties of the short story form.
It argues the short story has no time to waste, unlike the novel. It must grip us from the very first sentence, otherwise all is lost.
As an example, the preface recounts the story of a writing class professor who, fed up with every student writing dreadful and depressing stories about class warfare and the struggles of the proletariat, told his students in exasperation "don't just write about the proletariat and the dreadful existence of the oppressed. Add more variety! Please also consider spicier topics, and include an aristocrat now and then!"
(I'm quoting from memory and possibly making a mistake, but the next line stuck with me).
So the next day, the first student read a story which started like this:
"'What insolence!', cried the Duchess. 'Take your hand off my knee!'"
I think it's a great opening line.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#128> For whom is the funhouse fun?
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#129"“Several and a half metric miles North East of Sligo, split by a cascading stream, her body on earth, her feet in water, dwells the microcephalic community of Puckoon”
Puckoon, Spike Milligan
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#130> There were short, punchy openers like: Mother died today –Albert Camus, The Stranger
Well, that's only half the line. The real punch is the next part:
> Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know