In a post on Lit Hub, Jonathan Lee discusses the importance of hooking a reader with your first line. If your opening line isn’t inviting, your reader may not cross the threshold, Lee writes. In contrast, if you try to pack too much into your first words, you might seem frantic. “No one wants to feel the writer trying too hard,” Lee says.
When Lee wrote his novel High Dive, he spent a lot of time attempting to be clever, until he stumbled upon a simple opening: “When Dan was eighteen a man he didn’t know took him on a trip across the border.”
“Suddenly I knew this was where I needed to begin the book: the initiation of this boy into the IRA; the first time he crossed a line,” Lee says. “I also liked that this first sentence—which in my mind is Dan’s death sentence—was clear of commas. Not Lysol-ed to within an inch of its life, like some people’s doorways, but clean and uncluttered, as appealing entryways generally are.”
