Writing a Novel, Part Five: Beginnings, Plural

From a certain perspective, starting a new novel a new novel is nothing special.  After all, you’re going to be staring down a blank page many more times in the future.  Each new chapter, scene, and paragraph is the start of a sort of story.  Moreover, since we never know where a reader might skim, any given sentence might serve as reintroduction to the flow of text.  Your Real First Sentence, the one that goes at the tippity top of the word document, isn’t sui generis, but rather similar to the sort of work you’re supposed to be displaying all across your novel.  Its uniqueness is much more psychological than mechanical.  But that said, first sentences do have a hallowed place in writer culture.  So let’s take a look at some famous examples:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” –Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling

That’s the opening line to a billion-dollar franchise of novels.  And it’s good.  But what’s striking is that the reasons why it’s good aren’t things that we aspiring authors should think are confined to mysterious and holy Real First Sentences.  Rowling rolls out setting (an ordinary home), characters (a married couple), tone (the Dursleys are snooty, defensive), and foreshadowing (why do the Dursleys feel a need to point out their normality?) in only a line and a half.

True, introductions of setting and characters tend to show up at the start of scenes, but if Rowling had focused only on those two elements, and written a line like “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley lived at number four, Privet Drive,”  she would have been omitting the very parts of the sentence that made it most special.  Rowling’s use of ‘proud,’ ‘perfectly normal,’ and ‘thank you very much’ are the elements that unfurl the Dursleys’ tensions—and tension is the sort of thing that should be maintained across the scope of a good novel.

“I’d never given much thought to how I would die –though I’d had reason enough in the last few months – but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.” –Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

Meyer’s famous series is not often favorably compared to Harry Potter—read the last sentence of the third paragraph in this link for a fairly typical zeitgeist--and looking at Meyer’s opening line, it’s easy to see why someone predisposed to dislike her work would argue that she and Rowling are not in the same creative league.  Meyer uses an em dash construction, misses a contraction, manages to say ‘I’ five times, and is vague.

But consider her objective.

Bella, the narrator, is a great big bottle of angst, and if one takes the leap and identifies with her, those five ‘I’s become personal.  Meyer’s words are trailing and confused, but so is the viewpoint character.  Further, her last ambiguity, ‘I would not have imagined it like this,’ serves the same foreshadowing purpose as the final clause in Rowling’s sentence.

Both Rowling and Meyer’s starter lines build story.  Just like any other good pieces of novel writing.

Next time—What’s a plot, anyway?