More on First Lines

More studying of first lines of novels--this time in the form of reading the first line of every book I come across, most of them classics.

This is what I discovered:

And author has exactly 1 sentence (a short one, too, maybe 10 words) to get the reader completely into the setting OR the plot OR the character. That's it. One line. By the end of that first line, you've either caught them or you haven't. For most of the 1800s and early 1900s, authors seemed to favor getting you right into the setting (with lines like, "The wicked sea tossed and toppled the little ship as if it were a toy to be played with and then discarded."). Since the mid-1900s, authors have really drifted to dropping you right into the plot, but through the mind of the point-of-view character (the one that you see the story through). Like (a paraphrase of one of Susan Cooper's first lines) "He remembered that Mary told him they would all speak Welsh." The reason this is effective is it gives you a taste of all three--plot, character, and setting.

Several agents have decried the use of dialogue on page one. They seem to favor action rather than "talking heads". Dialogue is an easy way for an author to give information that sets the setting, backstory, and characters. The problem with it is that it doesn't open up the picture in the reader's mind. It just tells you that someone thinks something might have happened once or might be going to happen. Dialogue with action seems acceptable, as does dialogue with action and description. It's not that people can't talk on page one. It's that there shouldn't ONLY be talking on page one.

Most of the agents spend a lot of time trying to explain the intangible "It just has to be good" with "rules" (which they all admit are more like guidelines that can be broken because, well, if it's good, it doesn't follow rules anyway...). Rules like "No dream sequences." "Don't start with someone sitting around thinking." "There needs to be action on page one." "I want a body in line one." "No talking heads." "A description of the setting with no characters is boring."

What they mean is, "Go read a bunch of first lines and see what works. If you find you've read all of page 1 without thinking about it--that worked!"

So I'm still pondering the first line problem in my book. I like where I went with the first line I posted last week, but I couldn't get it to work with the rest of the book. As usual when I've done something wrong with the text, I couldn't work any more. I spent hours every day staring at the screen, re-reading chapter 1 and the first 3 pages of chapter 2 over and over and over, with a complete stupor of thought and inability to go on.

So now the first line (or two) says: "Kate suddenly wished that 'Escape from Coffins and Other Confined Spaces' had been a required course in her high school." She then squirms around and wishes she had the training and gadgets that kid spies from the stories have.

I'm still not entirely settled on it--there's still the problem of the segue back into the flashback that brings you to 12 hours earlier and shows how she got into the box. And it might be still not "right" somehow. But it's easier to work with than cookies.

Editor's Note: I realized the first line, as it stands, is not true to Kate's character. She would never presume a school that can't meet her academic needs would ever dream of meeting other needs. Now the first line reads, "Kate wished she'd read a book about escaping from coffins. Was there such a book?" This is true to Kate's character because she WOULD read a book about that for fun. She reads nonfiction avidly, and the last book she put down was "The Encyclopedia of Mummies," which she read just after she read a book on forensic entomology.