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What makes a great opening line?

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Re: What makes a great opening line?

#131

Post by the_af »

impostervt wrote: post #114
hodder wrote: post #59

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Perfect first line imo. Tells you the characters, the setting, and the plot.

Stephen King is very underrated in my opinion. Of course, everyone knows he is the wildly successful author of many bestsellers, but he is also considered low-brow and many won't acknowledge he can really write.

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#132

Post by robocat »

w0mbat wrote: post #110

“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.

I read that again recently and laughed that it would only resonate with readers that had analogue televisions when younger.

The quote is William Gibson, Neuromancer.

Neil Gaiman did a tribute to it in Neverwhere: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." because for a while, blue was the colour of an untuned channel.

Plenty of kids now probably don’t even grok what a channel number or TV is.

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#134

Post by the_af »

hutzlibu wrote: post #108

"The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders."

"And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Petibonum."

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#135

Post by darkerside »

tehnub wrote: post #118

>There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it. >I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion. >I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I w…

And selected for interest by a human. The best product seems to come from a combination of machine and man. Why should writing be any different?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#136

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

dsr_ wrote: post #12

What makes a great opening line? A great rest-of-the-story. Nobody praises the opening line of a story that they otherwise think is rather boring.

How many examples of a great opening line with a dismal rest-of-the-story do you have? To me, the great opening line is a microcosm of the great story: the tension between setup and punchline, between conflict and resolution, between mystery and revelation, and so on. The alchemy of storytelling is for an author to maintain that seemingly gravitational pull of the audience being inexorably hungry for the next answer without ever making it feel cheap. By extension, the ideal master of the craft can crystalize that dynamic at precisely the points that matter, and thereby make a space to play with such luxuries as theme and characterization and metaphor and parable in the rest.

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#138

Post by SamBam »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #136
dsr_ wrote: post #12

What makes a great opening line? A great rest-of-the-story. Nobody praises the opening line of a story that they otherwise think is rather boring.

How many examples of a great opening line with a dismal rest-of-the-story do you have? To me, the great opening line is a microcosm of the great story: the tension between setup and punchline, between conflict and resolution, between mystery and revelation, and so on. The alchemy of storytelling is for an author to maintain that seemingly gravitational pull of the audience being inexorably hungry for the next answer…

While I'm sure that one could find plenty of counter-examples if they tried, I did indeed flip through my (quite few) two-starred books on GoodReads, read their opening sentences, and found that each one was a clunker. So I think you make a good point.

Actually, I wonder if I could accurately guess my own ratings by how much I liked the first line.

Re: What makes a great opening line?

#140

Post by irrational »

In a short story, isn’t the last sentence just as important? For example, it is the last sentences of The Last Question by Asimov and The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke that make the stories. I’ll always remember the last sentences, I have no idea what the first sentences are (despite rereading both recently).
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