So we know that your open­ing line, or at least your open­ing para­graph, will define the tone and style of your story. We know that the open­ing line needs to be snappy and pow­er­ful to win over casual browsers at a book store. But what does that all actu­ally mean?

Let’s look at how to craft an open­ing line and see both what works and what doesn’t. To begin, we’ll look at the open­ing line from my first novel, Between Heaven and Hell.

It was a bright and sunny day in Wash­ing­ton DC, and Daniel Cho found him­self at the scene of an accident.

What’s wrong with this? So many things. (In my defense, it was 13 years ago, I was young and I needed the money.) First off, it’s a weather report.

Do not start the story with weather. It’s a rookie mis­take, and it makes you look like a rube. Any men­tion at all of the weather in the open­ing line pegs you as just one notch beyond “It was a dark and stormy night.” or “The night was humid.” Set­ting is impor­tant, sure, and there are lots of ways to estab­lish that in a para­graph or two, but it’s pretty low pri­or­ity for your open­ing line. Open­ing lines need to do four things:

  1. Estab­lish character.
  2. Estab­lish con­flict, or if you pre­fer, dra­matic ten­sion (no, you don’t have to start with a fight scene just because peo­ple say conflict).
  3. Set the nar­ra­tive tone or voice for the story.
  4. Broadly estab­lish the set­ting or genre of the story.

Tech­ni­cally, the line above meets all four of those cri­te­ria, but it does so in a very clumsy way, throw­ing the set­ting in your face and push­ing the con­flict back to almost an after­thought. What kind of acci­dent? Did some­body spill peanuts in aisle nine, or did a jet­liner crash into the Capi­tol dome (remem­ber folks, Tom Clancy did it long before al Qaida took a crack at it)? The stuff that should be direct is vague and the stuff that should be vague is direct. Def­i­nite room for improvement.

Here’s the first line from a rewrite I attempted in 2007.

Daniel had just stepped out of the 7-​Eleven when he heard the crash, his pis­ta­chio ice cream already melt­ing in the heat.

Bet­ter, but not per­fect. We’ve got an extra detail, the ice cream melt­ing in the heat, that tells us some­thing about where Daniel is with­out men­tion­ing the weather directly. But we still have an indi­rect tense (“had just” are unnec­es­sary words and warn­ing signs about your writ­ing) that removes Daniel and his per­cep­tions from the action. The tone is thus still ten­ta­tive. We also don’t know much about the crash, although that is more spe­cific than “acci­dent.” We’re still not sure how much we should care.

Daniel Cho stepped out of the 7-​Eleven and heard the unmis­tak­able col­li­sion of steel on steel.

This is sim­ple, direct and yet man­ages to tell us sev­eral use­ful things. We know our character’s name, where he is (broadly, we know he’s in a mod­ern urban set­ting where one might find a 7-​Eleven; this isn’t medieval fan­tasy or outer space) and that to him, the sound of steel col­lid­ing with steel is unmis­tak­able, giv­ing us a hint at his back­ground or pro­fes­sion (as it turns out, and as we’ll see in the next few para­graphs, Daniel is a para­medic in Wash­ing­ton DC). This line is the short­est of the three, and yet it’s the most pow­er­ful. It’s pow­er­ful in large part because it’s sim­ple, because it doesn’t beat around the bush and gets right to the action. We know there’s vio­lence afoot, and we know that Daniel is going to react to it. We’re hooked and ready to see what hap­pens next.