How to Write a Strong First Line 

That's a wonderful example of strong imagery to start!

First34 I read that last week

Sadly, it is now dated. How many people are familiar with analog television? Still, Gibson couldn't know at the time. And it might still be a great novel (on my 'to read'-list)

@@ludwigvanel9192 I've read and re-read it many times. I hope you'll enjoy it (or you already have). My only regret about the book is that it isn't longer.

Apparently he redrafted that intro over 20 times before he was satisfied with it. Sometimes it's good to be a perfectionist...

That's a great one!

I like it. Keep going!

Love ❤️

Wow kfkdkd that's catchy as fuck XD

amazing.

this is amazing!! i would love to read it, do you have a link?? it sounds amazing!!

​@@jxoosy I could send the story but the issue is it turned out boring, not to mention poorly written. I wrote it before I knew how to write. - I mean I still don't, but now I know how not to write. The first line promises much, but delivers little. Anyways, I won't completely leave you hanging, so here are some bits from Earth and Mars that aren't cringeworthy; mostly the first and last sentences of paragraphs. What ever you think is between these beginnings and ends is better then the reality. Earth and Mars I find it difficult to drink next to dying children. This whiskey looks like poison, smells like poison, tastes like poison and burns my throat like flaming petrol; even so, none of the alcohol contains poison, only everything else does. Preparing to die is a strange business, when you are in love. Then we look up. The bloody eye in the sky creeping bigger. We wait. The house starts to shake under pressure from more water gushing in the streets and bashing against its wooden frame. The flat red circle in the sky dents and turns into a ball, and now it doesn’t feel like it`s getting bigger - now it`s getting closer. The blood soaked bloody eyeball in the lemonade sky can`t fit inside a field of vision. On the other side, a darkness bridges the gap between Earth and Mars. Star colored roots sprout out of grounds far away in the blackness and in momentary bursts latch themselves to Mars to explode and dissipate. From where Quebec use to be, I catch with my eye the first photons of an interplanetary spark that will extinguish life.

​@@andrejparunovic6888 oh my gosh! its not bad at all, in fact it's not poorly written, its beautiful! thank you for sharing your words. I am appreciative of your getting back to me!

If that's your first line then I am hooked!

Antoinette Singleton How does this sound?: “A man ran up to the stage, fought the guards, and shot President Mitchell in the head.”

@@savagenovelist2983 that one is too in the face. And a bit too reminiscent on history. The I think it was president Lincoln?

Yep, probably the greatest first line ever. Or at least my favourite. Ditto the book.

Legit, that line has always stuck with me. And I’ve never read the book. That’s how good it is.

i loved this book, i had forgotten I read it

Well I read this one sin short story in the novel back in college and it was amazing. I guess thanks to you I'm going to have to read it again. Thank you haha

That is a pretty excellent first line.

Damn it. I wanna read the rest of that now. Don`t leave me stranded here, I wanna read more!

It was the first line of Red Sister, by Mark Lawrence,@@andrejparunovic6888. And so far the series has been incredible. Has to be one of the most epic first lines I've ever read, so I figured I'd share it here.

I am hooked. Keep going!!

Try again. Someone will say yes!

my mistake always. i personally like it, but well it won´t grabn anyone but me, so I wouldn´t even send something of that is too "fluffy" in the beginning. well i need to finish something before I send it off anyway^^

how is your novel going?? did you finish it??

Favorite opening line too, really memorable

Love that series!

Halow Walker I like it a lot, but I’d edit it to end after “what he did” instead of what he did to Sophie. I like the added mystery of not having even the slightest clue what mark did or who he did it to

Very good.

Nice but what I noticed is that because I don’t know who these names are, the reader might hardly care. I think it might be different if they seemed like random people. So for example, “after what he did to his sister or to my sister”. Then I’d be intrigued...

“ When they killed Mark I didn’t look away”. Just stop at that, it’s a really good first line if you stop there. The rest just kills it.

@@arshthakur5739 agreed. These second half is not only weaker but it's actually a second sentence. The comma shouldn't be in between.

I gotta say: it doesn't feel as if coming from a POVC, it feels a bit too much like telling. I like "Method acting for writers" by Lisa Hall-Wilson. It taught me a lot about Deep Point of View, which improved my writing bigly. The situation you paint is intriguing, though.

This is good, and I'm a developmental editor.

Hi, Rose. I like the situation this first line introduces. I like the questions this arises in my mind as I'm wondering who the prisoner is, what is going to happen to him/her. and why the crowds are milling around as the prisoner glides forward. I'm just wondering if it can be more impactful. I'm not to crazy about your use of present tense(I write in past tense), but I'll leave that up to people with more experience than I to answer whether or not a manuscript written in present tense by a first time author is more likely to be rejected by an agent than one written in past tense. I have some questions. What is your voice? Is it omniscient? Third person limited? The reason why I'm asking is because I'm getting a tone of omniscient from the first line because you start the story from an outside view, and thus I don't really feel connected to the story because I'm, er...outside, looking in. I want to be drawn in, I want to be a part of the action. If this is purposeful, if it's omniscient, then please disregard everything else. I can't help you because I only write in third person limited. If it's third person limited, I would focus on a particular character(by name) and what they are feeling in this moment, since this is a highly emotional, perhaps volatile, situation. The second question I would ask is who is the POV of your story? The prisoner? Someone in the crowd? I would focus on that and what they're feeling. Thirdly, is the prisoner marching toward his death, or something else? Whenever you include death, like Shaelin mentioned, that is a compelling hook. EXS: "Waylan stared at the crowds outside the bars of his moving prison as it bounced along the uneven dirt road toward his death." Or: "The prison transport rumbled along toward the execution site, and Melvin couldn't be happier." Then, in the next line, you could talk about the crowds and evoke a little bit of imagery to set the scene. Anyways, I don't know what you were going for, but I hoped this helped somewhat. Take care.

I like it. It isn't the smoothest read since I get hung up on vehicle but that's just me being picky. It sets up intrigue that makes me want to read more.

YES, TOP HAT 21, THE BEGINNING OF "A TALE OF TWO CITIES" IS BRILLIANT AND ONE OF MY FAVOURITES. YOU HAVE GOOD TASTE.

I know you posted this a while ago and there's a chance you didn't use either of those lines, but just wanted to say I really enjoyed that first line! Had I discovered it in a book, I would have definitely been hooked :)

I know this is an even later feedback, but you did say you wanted an honest opinion, so here's mine... 1 - I get what you're trying to achieve with "the deafening screams of silence." You want the silence to feel so oppressive and hostile as to invoke anxiety in the narrator character, and a feeling of not being wanted in that space. The problem is, 'deafening screams' are a sound made by **people** who are in a state of terror and/or anguish - they're **active** sounds **actively** made, typically made in response to **something being inflicted upon them.** So **they're** suffering in that sense, not the narrator character. I think if you swapped out 'deafening screams' for something with a less sentient feel, that would create the sense of unease you're after - because that would mirror the LACK of audience interaction. Maybe use a sound often used to describe something like a weather or environmental phenomenon, for instance? Like, a storm can be 'thunderous,' and traffic can 'roar,' but neither storms nor traffic are living things that actually make those sounds consciously, to TRY and be scary or oppressive - it's just our human perception of the threat they pose, that layers that on top. (I'm sure you can think of better ones than these two rather obvious go-tos.) That's the quality I think you need for this sentence - that feeling that it's the NARRATOR consciously putting that perception on the silence for this particular moment, rather than the silence itself 'responding' as if it's somehow being 'harmed'' by the narrator character walking up to the rostrum. Does that make sense? 2 - I'm not sure what this second line is trying to say. If it's meant to immediately follow the previous line, it almost feels like the narrator character is critiquing her own, previous first line - which is not ideal, as it breaks immersion for the reader. It's also an assumption, directed straight at the reader - you're steering the reader into how they're 'supposed' to be feeling about that previous line - and a lot of readers don't like being told how to feel about what they're reading. And then "Well, you're next" ...for what, exactly? Is the narrator character going to make the reader walk up to the rostrum as well? How are they gonna do that, when they're just a character in a book? Again, the reader immediately feels like they're being 'bossed around' by this narrator character - and that can be a big turn-off. (Even if this second line is NOT from the same story, and is therefore a first line from another, entirely different one, I think the points still stand - and both lines are even MORE confusing to start with, as the reader doesn't even know what they're supposed to be 'flummoxed' about, or what they're 'next' for, at this stage - there's zero context for either.) Please don't be discouraged by all of this feedback; it's not a reflection on your writing ability or anything like that. In fact, if I wouldn't have gone to all this trouble of explaining my thoughts in this much detail if I didn't think you were more than capable of fixing it. 😊And of course all feedback is just opinion - there will be many who completely disagree with everything I've written, and you may be one of them - and that's completely okay. Just 'cause it's my opinion doesn't automatically make it right. 😊

Silence isn't deafening. Flummoxed? isn't a terrific opening sentence either. I recommend that you stop trying so hard. When I look at people in bookshops they read the publisher's blurb on the back of the book and what seems to be the first paragraph of the book, if they even open it up, before either placing it back on the shelf or purchasing it. Many don't browse at all and know what they want and find it and buy it, which suggests someone gave them a word of mouth recommendation. Assuming the latter is going to snowball into more sales, more word of mouth, etc. It is pretty obvious that the person who started the snowball rolling down the mountainside read the whole novel, and not just the first sentence. Worry more about the last sentence. Worry more about the impact your novel has on the reader you want to be so passionate about it they recommend it to others.

just ugh, no, nothing about that is working - don't rewrite it - see if you have other sentences further along, maybe that's where your real story commences and you can delete everything that came prior

Did any of these work out?

...here I go again. My, my How can I resist you?

Yes, this is perfectly good way to begin a story. I can think of a few examples of this technique being used -- although they were flashBacks not flashForwards. I think that this would be a good way to establish 'what kind of a story its going to be' and a number of symbols that will be used.

If it's a humorous book, that would probably be a good approach!

Tbh, it's a little difficult to continue reading

I would phrase that, "He was tense, excited, thirsting for blood."

@@superpuppy7854 That does seem better.

You're a psychologist, so why would you add "as such"? Does being a psychologist make you somehow special, or different in some extraordinary way? I'm a refuse collector, and as such I abhor the stench of elitism.

@@davidpalmer1628 Hello David, your response is interesting.

What’s the apple green sunlight? Is it actually green? And does it matter how pure the golden rod is? I think anyone could notice how much that would cost, without knowing how pure the gold is. You also didn’t mention the castle early enough. I, for one, saw a rod in a house. Try describing the smell of the castle, or maybe how the sunlight stung the characters’ eyes. Mention the character, at least.

Ok picky part first. This is not an opening line, it's two. (count the periods). The first one is a sentence fragment anyways so It would be better if it all were just one line. "Under this night sky filled with stars, I can't just sit and lie to myself, like I never knew myself." The primary purpose of punctuation is to help the reader to understand the intent of the sentence and a major part of this/that is to make it easy to understand, so use only as much (punctuation) as necessary.(KISS) Your first seven words constitute an Absolute Phrase which means it can be placed anywhere in the sentence and still preserve its meaning. "I can't just sit under this night sky filled with stars, and lie to myself, like I never knew myself." "I can't just sit and lie to myself, under this night sky filled with stars, like I never knew myself." "I can't just sit and lie to myself, like I never knew myself, under this night sky filled with stars." To keep the coherence of the Phrase I believe that it would be best to lose the comma after sky. This comma does serve a purpose but it is a secondary purpose which is pretty well already filled by the word order (a trait of English). So lets leave it out for the sake of clarity. Another concept is that of "Psychic Distance". This mean starting with the more pheripheral and unimportant pieces and then focusing in on more approximal and important pieces. I mention this as it is exactly what you have done with your absolute phrase. The opening suggests a work of self-reflection, self-denial and maybe a bit of self-loathing which is made more apparent by the hint of the night sky. A star filled sky gives me an immediate sense of an omipotent and critical presence. The best place for this phrase is at the very beginning therefore your rating goes up for its inclusion there. The secondary purpose of a comma is to control the rhythm of the 'speech' and support the 'logic' of the sentence. This is done perfectly well by the comma after (the first) 'myself'. The rhythm emphasis supports the Logical emphasis of this being a self-reflective work. NOW, could we push the first period (down/up to) a semi-colon? In this way we could preserve the inclusion of the first comma as the semi-colon would define the absolute phrase. Well, I guess so BUT 1) I don't find that first comma all that necessary 2) doesn't the sentence seem to become a bit crowded with punctuation? So 3/3, 4/5, (7,8,9)/10. The only thing lacking in this opening would be dependent on who it is about. Is it about Paris Hilton who never got a red pony for her birthday, or about Oscar Schindler crossing names off of his list?