Perhaps the one that is most frequently mentioned when people say “Famous Opening Lines” is from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The actual opening line of Slaughterhouse-Five says, “All this happened, more or less.” Which is complete and utter nonsense, and provides no dramatic hook at all.īut, of course, there are plenty of more famous opening lines than my particular favorite. It’s almost like Kurt Vonnegut took the rule book for writing opening lines, dared anyone to do it better, and then threw the story in a trash can like Kilgore Trout was sometimes wont to do. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” is a spectacularly brilliant opening line that gets intentionally buried, and whose impact is intentionally undercut by stating it before its proper dramatic time. This one is a failure, and it had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. and it also appears at the end of chapter one: It’s eight words of perfectly-written dramatic hook.īut it’s not the opening line. It says, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” It does everything a great opening line should do: it establishes an unmistakable authorial tone, which even dares to break the “fourth wall” and speak directly to the reader it introduces a character whose very name, “Billy Pilgrim,” sets him up as an everyman on a journey and it creates a circumstance that makes Billy Pilgrim ridiculously interesting, namely that he’s come unstuck in time-whatever that means, but I sure want to read the book to find out. My all-time favorite opening line is from Slaughterhouse-Five. On top of that, my all-time favorite opening line is not really an opening line at all. The ones that I’ve included here, I had to go look up. However, it recently occurred to me that I could not recite the opening line from a single one of my favorite novels. There are even first line generators to get you started, if you happen to be incapable of forming a sentence but still want to be a writer. My Google search for “how to write a great opening line” turned up 83.5 million results. That elusive perfect opening image, the one that instantly hooks the reader, that declares this book to be un-put-down-able, has developed an almost mythical importance among fiction writers. Anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class has been indoctrinated with the importance of the first impression.
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