Does anybody want to go back a few days and play with first lines that are irresistible?
Am I the only one who remembers this doozie: “‘Damn,’ said the duchess as she walked down the stairs smoking a cigar.” This is at least fifty years old. Or five hundred. But it was an example of a hook. As readers we’re supposed to be mesmerized by the unlikeliness of it all — the swearing aristocrat with a Roi Tan jones. What struck me then was the misplaced modifier. The stairs weren’t smoking a cigar. Yet that’s the only thing that would have made me read on.
If you want to play, just add first lines in the comment box. Either actual ones from real books/stories or ones you make up. After a few days we can vote on a winner. Or not.
Here’s one from a Deb Olin Unferth’s story in the July 2009 HARPER’S. And it isn’t even a first line, but goddamn it (as Holden would say) it should be.
It’s from a fictional student’s ESL paper: “Thou laid really excellent basement.”
Top that if you can.
RK
"'Great Scott!' cried Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut. 'Your mother just lost her hand in the rotating band saw!'"
–M.T. Anderson, The Curse of the Linoleum Lederhosen
"On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap. On Highway 53 he couldn't stop swallowing screams." –Adam Rapp, 33 snowfish
Oops, it's "Clue" not "Curse." I always get that wrong.
Don't you wish that Tobin's dandy first line (see Jan. 31 comment from Chris) would be followed by this one:
"Not again!"
RK
Ron…
Didn't realize they quoted (blurbed?) you in the back of 33 snowfish. What an AMAZING book. Finished it up last night. I was stunned. I may not look at YA fiction in the same way ever again.
Dandy second line, alternative #2: "But even worse than the moment Mom lost her hand was the day we finally found it."
OK, Jason, any book you describe as AMAZING deserves to be added to my "to read–soon!" list.
"Grandmother was ninety-seven before I saw her breasts for the first time."
–I tried Ron's technique a couple months ago for the first line of a poem. This was the result. It didn't sound like me so I changed it to, "Grandma always changed with her back toward me."
It's boring, but I put it in my blog that way anyway. I think we get caught up in the second and third sentences forgetting we short changed the first.