When my subscription to Jericho Writers is due for renewal later this year, I won’t be continuing my membership. I’ve had excellent value from being a member of the writers’ group, and have benefited from reams of invaluable generic advice. I’d recommend it to anyone learning the craft of fiction writing. But that value has run its course for me. That’s partly because there’s too much of a focus on genre writing, where established practices are often adhered to. One involves the importance of first lines.
“Giving your novel a killer first line sounds like an obvious thing to do…” sums up the advice regularly dished out by the team at Jericho Writers. I understand why, especially when it comes to genre fiction. But I don’t read a lot of genre fiction; neither do I want to write it.
In the writing world that exists beyond genre, the advice doesn’t quite carry the same importance.
The 100 best novels of all time
Recently, The Guardian published an article listing the 100 best novels of all time based on the top 10 choices of various authors. One of the interesting aspects of the article was it included the first line for each. Some of these are indisputably killer first lines.
Killer first lines
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – The Go-Between by LP Hartley
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” – Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” – Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” – Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
“In a certain village in La Mancha, of which I cannot remember the name, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen, who are never without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound.” – Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Then there are those on the list with first lines which are, well, bordering on bland.
Forgettable first lines
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
“For a long time I used to go to bed early.” – In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
“My name is Ruth.” – Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
“See the child.” – Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
“This morning Rino telephoned.” – My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
I suspect none of these would make it onto a shortlist of best first lines in a competition. And yet, they’ve made it to a list of the top 100 books of all time, which is my point about just how important, or not, that first line is. To test it further, here are the opening lines from the last five books I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading.
Random first lines
“Where did life go?” – The Offing by Benjamin Myers
“We were a hardy people, raised facing the Atlantic – The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr
“It was the second day of the holidays and me and Jo were down the Causeway Field with nothing to do.” – Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
“Call me Ishmaelle.” – Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo
“The boy, Leopold Jonas Sercombe, stood by his father at the open doorway to the smithy.” – The Horseman by Tim Pears
There’s nothing gasp-inducing about any of those. There doesn’t have to be. Each novel is original (okay, Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of a classic, but it’s still original). The opening line feels fresh and organic rather than something adapted from a blueprint.
Writing by numbers
Picking any ‘twist in the tale’ thriller at random, I already know what the first line is likely to be, the structure that is, rather than the actual words. I’ll use The Housemaid by Freida McFadden as an example because it’s a recent massive bestseller. Before I check it out, I know it will, as advice on the Jericho Writers’ site suggests, “…create curiosity by hinting at a core disturbance or tension.”
“If I leave this house, I know it will be in handcuffs.”
There you go. Readers know exactly what they’re getting. The thing is, some of us don’t want to read variations of a mass-produced blueprint.
Keeping it human
If I know what that first line is likely to be, so does AI. I asked ChatGPT for a ten-word first line for a thriller with a twist-in-the-tail and also one for a literary novel. That was it, no synopsis. This is what it came up with for the twist-in-the-tail novel:
“Yesterday’s murder victim answered my phone before dawn, whispering apologies.”
It’s pretty good. Intriguing. As good as many human-created openers in the genre. And here’s AI’s suggestion for the literary novel:
“Mother planted roses where the railway ended, expecting nobody’s forgiveness.”
At first read, it might sound decent as well. But it’s applying exactly the same formula as its previous offering. It’s a genre first line that lacks the random originality a human brain can produce.
I don’t want a killer first line to draw me into a book, I want one that could only be written by a human author.
