First Lines Exercise

 Occasionally, my writing coach gives me an exercise to do that leads somewhere fun.  This was  the case.  He gave us a link to fifty of the best opening lines.  I've done this one before so I made sure not to pick lines I'd already examined.  It makes for fun blog fodder.  
Dissecting my five favorite lines starts with recognizing that sometimes a favorite line is not because of what It says, but what I remember from experiencing the story itself.

For example, one of my favorite memories from college involved reading Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend,” but aside from recalling it starts with a father and daughter rowing the Temps and dredging bodies and treasures from it, I do not remember another moment in the book itself. I do remember loving it, but that had nothing to do with the story (though it might have been good), as much as the story behind why I read it. It involves chicken pox, the infirmary at college, and an English teacher who officially declared I didn’t have to do another professor’s assignments while quarantined. (A professor at Notre Dame had assigned Albert Camus’ The Plague). So I looked at all the lines for the ones that whether I’d read the story or not, I could discuss something of what a reader upon seeing the first line, might guess about what was to come. There are books on the list I remember hating, but I get that the first line gets people and why. I hate everything about George Orwell’s 1984, most especially being assigned it because I was in the high school class of 1984. We endured a lot of references and frankly, by senior year, I didn’t care what time it was. However, “It was a bright cold day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen—” told us everything was wrong and yet uniform, that the world we entered in these pages, would be off but not incorrect, eerie and accurate and strange like a nightmare. I might be projecting from knowing the rest of the story, but I can’t not think that the opening sentence presents us with hints of how not alien the story to unfold is, and how dangerous at the same time.

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” –Samuel Beckett, Murphy I like a line that takes what we presume and either makes it new or reminds us when it is not. There’s a wit to this first sentence, and the added “the” keeps us from just running through the whole line. “The nothing new,” is emphasized by that article, and the sentence is at once an utterance of discouragement, and a promise of the search yet to come, for something better than, something other than the nothing. We are also, like the sun, gazing on the words, which in many cases when we open a book, are also, the nothing new.

“Mother died today.” –Albert Camus, The Stranger We immediately are in the immediate, and that sort of moment in real life is rare, and thus being placed in that moment equally so. Camus is not a favorite author but I’ve read much of his work and placing us in that moment at the start pf the story with when in real life, we would be most likely to wrestle with big questions, most likely to question our own answers, and most exposed to the extent any of us allow, by our thin understanding of the consequences of certain answers, is his specialty. Good stories, good literature strike at what matters, and Camus gets straight to the topic he wishes to address by placing us in this singular universal either experienced or dreaded moment that all of us have. , “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” –Ford Madox Ford in The Good Soldier Sometimes, bravado works. Here, because the reader already knows the title of the book, the opening line essentially offers a promise, of a tale of woe. The onus is on the author to deliver, but it also harkens back to another favorite story for me, “Rage –Goddess sing the rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles” for setting the tone. The narrator in both the Iliad and this story, is setting the tone for the reader of what is to come, and it’s gutsy to do. What will make the story sad becomes the important issue before anything Is known. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” –C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Now I happen to love this book. Of Old Jacks’ works, this one I’ve read perhaps the most often, and the mere mention of it makes me want to go and read it again. However, it is the revealing to the reader the whole of the story in a single sentence without giving away the ending that I love. The name seems like the most horrible name a writer could devise to give a character, and the author laughing at hi own mischief with the commentary. Beyond that, for those who do not know the story, it is the re-envisioning of the tale of Saint Paul becoming Saint Paul, and of the redemption necessary in that tale, for the ungenerous dangerous unpleasant human being (Eustace) to become more fully the human that we eventually love in the story.

P.S. I started reading Our Mutual Friend with my sixteen-year old son for fun. We’ll see if It turns out as fondly as I remember, beyond the story of why I read it.