How to Write an Absolutely Great First Sentence

I wrote this post on writing a great first sentence as a companion-piece to Anne’s recent post on writing a great first chapter.

With apologies to Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by writers and certainly by agents and editors, that no matter what genre, your first sentence must compel the reader to continue.

Because your first sentence is the first thing your potential reader sees in Look Inside, you must come up with something that’s one hundred per cent absolutely, positively come-hither irresistible.

Those few words must establish the voice, set the tone, induce curiosity and promise the answer to an urgent question.

In your first sentence you must present yourself and your book with confidence and authority.

If you’ve written a thriller, your first sentence must promise thrills.

If you’ve written a romance, your first sentence must promise romance.

Whatever genre you write, you must make your reader an offer s/he can’t refuse. You can choose from a menu of approaches when you compose that crucial first sentence.

Here are a few of the possibilities—

• A tease
• A jolt
• Or a shock
• Or a dare
• Perhaps a provocation?
• An invitation
• A seduction
• Maybe a declaration
• Or a promise

Depending on your genre, consider—

• Creating danger.
• Laying out your character’s inner struggles.
• Invoking deep emotion.
• Introducing suspense.
• Defining — or hinting at — the mystery.
• Initiating the quest.
• Starting the mission (whether it’s to find love, get the Bad Guy, or save civilization).
• Establishing the mood: light and humorous, dark and dangerous, or daring and scary.

Whatever your genre and whatever your goal, you must lure your reader by writing a sentence so provocative and so powerful that s/he is compelled to continue.

Conversely, just like a nothing-burger cover or a meh blurb, a flabby, clunky or just-plain-boring first sentence will turn readers off and cause them to look for something else to read.

Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, romance or sci fi, a thriller or a mystery, the first sentence of your book must achieve one goal: force the reader to read on.

Stephen King has said that he spends “months and years” creating that first line. He goes on to say: “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”

The question is, how do we accomplish all this in one sentence? From Moby Dick’s “Call me Ishmael” to Charles Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” some first sentences have become timeless classics.

An analysis of masterful first sentences offers instructive, inspiring guidance to the wide variety of ways accomplished writers draw readers into their web. (Ooops, stories.)

What’s this Book About? How To Set A Theme.

Whether classic literature, hard-boiled pulp fiction, or cyberpunk scifi, the first sentence can be used to establish a theme that will continue throughout the story.

Be warned, though, that if the book does not follow through on the promise of that first sentence, the disappointed reader will feel cheated. (And s/he will not click the buy button on any of your other books.)

Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides establishes the theme of his novel The Virgin Suicides in the first sentence.

“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”

What had happened, to cause these young women to take such a desperate act? And why did each one choose a different method to end her own life? We want answers to these questions.

Leo Tolstoy

In the first sentence of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy tells us that we are about to read about an unhappy family.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Why, we ask ourselves, are they unhappy? What has happened to them and what will they do? Powerful questions the reader wants answered.

James Matthew Barrie

Barrie establishes the gist of Peter Pan with a brief, declarative statement.

“All children, except one, grow up.”

Which child, we wonder. Why did he not grow up? And what will happen to a child who doesn’t grow up?

Franz Kafka

A far different theme is set forth by Franz Kafka in his posthumously published 1925 novel, The Trial.

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

With these words, Kafka thrusts us immediately into the MC’s waking nightmare of terror and paranoia that will be sustained throughout the story.

William Gibson

William Gibson’s Neuromancer was the first novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. The chilling first sentence, said to have been written at the last minute, sets the novel’s theme of a burnt-out computer hacker adrift in a dystopian near future governed by artificial intelligence.

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

Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson launches his novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by introducing a place, a mood, and a theme (a disenchanted retrospective look at the 1960s) in the first sentence.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

The First Person First Sentence

In a novel written in the first person, the author puts himself in the mind of the central character and, in one way or another, tells us that we are about to get the real deal.

No BS here, the author promises, just the honest, unvarnished truth about someone we want to know more about.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath uses the first sentence of The Bell Jar, to establish the nervous, dark mood that hovers over the character and the story. Her story begins —

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

Plath’s use of the word electrocuted provides an unexpected jolt and mention of the Rosenbergs sets a time (June 1953). Sultry summer sets an uncomfortable season, New York establishes a place, and the final phrase conveys the uncertainty of a young woman struggling to find an identity and a place in life.

Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov uses the first nine words of Lolita to convey the obsessive erotic desire that pulses through the entire novel.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”

Nabokov begins by naming the object of his passion, the word light expresses her transformative power over the narrator, the word loins promises that we will be reading a story about sex. The repetition of the letter l feels like an incantation.

Anne R. Allen

In Ghostwriters In The Sky, Book 1 of The Camilla Randall Mysteries, Anne uses her first sentence to introduce the MC, locate the place (the subway can only mean NYC), and refer to the season (sweaty indicates hot, most likely summer).

“The subway car was so crowded I couldn’t tell which one of the sweaty men pressing against me was attached to the hand now creeping up my thigh.”

The phrase “creeping up my thigh” indicates a level of creepy, unwanted intrusion which places the character in an uneasy situation — a theme that will reverberate throughout the novel.

J. D. Salinger

In Catcher In the Rye, J.D. Salinger uses an effective but contradictory combination of bravado and vulnerability to establish a unique voice as he introduces us to preppy Holden Caulfield.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

We read on because Salinger’s confessional tone makes us want to know more about his lousy childhood and find out why he doesn’t feel like going into it.

Andy Weir

In The Martian, Andy Weir starts by telling us his character is in deep, deep trouble.

“I’m pretty much fucked.”

How can we not want to know A) what happened to him and B) what is he going to do about it?

The Third Person First Sentence

JRR Tolkien

In The Hobbit, Tolkien begins by telling us where his MC lives, but in such a startling way that we feel compelled to read on.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

A hobbit? A story about a creature who lives in a hole? Who or what is this hobbit and why does he live in a hole. Curious, we read on.

John Grisham

In his legal thriller, The Firm, John Grisham uses his first sentence to tell us that this unnamed and mysterious senior partner will indeed find something to dislike about Mitchell Y. McDeere who, the word résumé indicates, is being considered for a job.

“The senior partner studied the résumé for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper.”

What kind of job, we wonder, and what will the senior partner find to dislike?

Grisham’s tease promises shady doings and the reader is lured on.

Ian Fleming

In Goldfinger, Ian Fleming introduces 007 in the first sentence.

“James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami airport and thought about life and death.”

Fleming has told us in only a few words that his MC is a drinking man, one who travels, and one who contemplates larger, existential questions.

Where, we wonder, is Bond going, what is he going to do once he gets there, and why does he need to down two double bourbons before he boards his flight?

Graham Greene

In Brighton Rock, Greene compels us to want to know more.

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”

Who are the ‘they?’ we wonder. And what has Hale done? Why do ‘they’ want to kill him?

Ruth Harris

Here’s DeeDee Dahlen, the MC in Love And Money, Book 3 of my Park Avenue Series.

“Her name was DeeDee Dahlen and she was famous from the day she was born.”

How can a newly-born infant be famous?

What rewards — and penalties — does unasked-for celebrity impose? What secrets and scandal and disappointments will define her future? — provocative questions that will hover over the entire novel.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Garcia Marquez begins One Hundred Years of Solitude with this memorable sentence —

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

The author uses a shocking situation — a man facing a firing squad — plus a long-ago memory to pique our curiosity.

Who is the Colonel and what had he done that he ends up facing a firing squad? What was there about the discovery of ice that it has lodged so forcefully in his memory? Compelling questions to which we must find the answer and, thus, we continue to read.

A Shock. A Jolt. A tease.

A skillfully written first sentence containing a tease, a shock or a jolt will dare the reader not to continue.

George Orwell

The first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, often considered one of the best one hundred books of the 20th Century, tells us immediately that something — time itself — is awry in a future world of Big Brother, doublethink and government surveillance.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Joe Konrath

Joe Konrath pulls us right into the action in the first sentence of his mystery thriller, Dirty Martini, Book 4 of the Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels Mystery series.

“No security cameras this time, but he still has to be careful.”

What is he doing, we wonder? In his first sentence, Konrath lets us know that whatever it is, it’s something he’s done before. Something risky, perhaps dangerous, and, even though experienced, he still has to be careful. Of what? Of whom?

Dennis Lehane

In his short story, Until Gwen, Lehane pulls us in with the use of the second person combined with the promise of drugs and sex.

“Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.”

James Ellroy

In L.A. Confidential, James Ellroy’s first sentence introduces a main character, sets a theme, and tells us exactly what we are about to read. Ellroy uses a knowledgeable tone and vernacular language to let us know he knows what he’s talking about.

“An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic, and a switchblade he’d bought off a pachuco at the border — right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootsack his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.”

The Rule Breakers

Daphne DuMaurier

Although writers are regularly cautioned to never, never, never start a book with a character’s dream, that rule was effectively broken in the classic first sentence of Daphne DuMaurier’s famous gothic mystery, Rebecca.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

Marie Force

Force begins her Gansett Island romance, Meant For Love, with a reference to a dream.

“The dream was always the same, the last perfect moment before life as Jenny Wilks knew it changed forever.”

Both dreams refer to emotionally significant aspects of the characters’ pasts. The reader wonders why the unidentified first-person narrator of Rebecca dreams of a place and Jenny Wilks of a “perfect” life now gone forever.

In these two examples, authors use dreams to provoke interest in their characters and in the events of the story about to unfold.

The passive tense is also considered to be another absolute no-no.

Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry, in The Tears Of Autumn, considered to be one of the best espionage thrillers of the 20^th Century, uses the passive tense to introduce American intelligence officer, Paul Christopher, who is investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

“Paul Christopher had been loved by two women who could not understand why he had stopped writing poetry.”

McCarry’s elegant use of the passive tense to introduce his main character and the theme of the book: an exploration of glittering promise that results in the wreckage of unintended consequences — the end of poetry and the end of Camelot.

Let Your Creativity Shine!

Your first sentence is your opportunity to let your creativity shine. Whether you decide to go for a tease or a jolt, a theme or a rule breaker, a first person or third person introduction, remember what Mom always said: You never have a second chance to make a first impression.

And, as usual, Mom was right.

by Ruth Harris (@RuthHarrisBooks) October 30, 2022

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What about you, scriveners? Do you obsess over that first sentence? Have you launched a book with a meh opener and thought of a better one later? What is your favorite first sentence of a novel?