There is nothing quite like a good opening sentence. 

It’s the prim doorman at a high end hotel ready to greet you to the establishment in his shiny buttoned suit. It’s the pleasant smell of freshly baked bread as you step into the clean artisanal bakery. It’s the opening chord to the bombastic action movie, filling your veins with adrenaline as the title screen flashes before the movie theatre. 

In pretty much every medium, place of business and social interaction, the importance of a good impression is paramount. Your opening line is really the first taste someone is going to get of your novel. And much like a restaurant, you don’t want them stepping inside, looking around and wondering about the quality or cleanliness of your offering. And much like first inspecting a restaurant, people aren’t going to push past a poor first impression, look away from a rather unappetizing menu and push on through a bland and tasteless entree just to get to your delicious and award winning dessert. 

They’ll just turn around and try the next eatery down the street. 

Your first sentence is meant to hook prospective readers. You’re trying to entice those people who may be walking down the aisle of a bookstore, peering at covers and poking their nose into the first pages. Or, more likely nowadays, you’re hoping to grab people that are scrolling through online shops and scanning the short blurbs and sample pages as they go through lists of recommended items. 

Sure, your cover art is probably the first thing that will attract a prospective reader’s attention. However, very few writers are really in charge of their cover art. Either you’re a traditionally published author (or hoping to be) and the cover art is wholly out of your control or you’re not a very good artist yourself and you have to commission or use digital tools to slap something together. Very few writers out there are also accomplished artists especially given how difficult it is to master both fields of art. 

So we mostly have to hope the cover will do its work. 

Now, the next point of contact will probably be your back cover summary. And yes, this is often under your control. Or, at the very least, you should get some practice in writing them since they’re often what you’ll use to pitch to publishers anyway. However, that is a whole complicated can of worms itself that is well beyond the scope of today’s post. 

So we’ll assume that works as well. But once you have drawn your prospective audience’s attention with your cover and drawn them in with an enticing blurb, you now have them at your opening sentence. This is the real test and the moment of truth for you as a writer. See, most people know that covers and blurbs don’t give a true taste of the experience they’re hoping to bite into. They’re the clean dining room and the enticing menu trying to get you to try the dish. But that sentence is the first bite. And you can’t have them tasting something bland.

Because unlike a restaurant, your audience will just get up and leave. It costs them nothing to read the first few lines of your book, put it back on the shelf and walk out. 

I don’t think that would fly very well in Gordon Ramsey’s establishment. 

Thus, it’s important to hook your reader with that first sentence. You want to grab their interest and make them want to continue reading through that first paragraph, page and chapter. Leave them wanting more and unable to put your book down. That’s how you grab your readership.

But what makes a good opening sentence?

Outside of the obvious – whatever captures your reader’s attention – it’s a bit of a more nuanced discussion. It’s going to depend on the genre of fiction you’re writing, your tone and authorial voice. Which isn’t particularly helpful, I know. 

So when thinking about your opening line, look up your favourite books. See what they wrote as their opening sentence. Try and figure out how the author was trying to grab your attention with that line. 

For general guidance, I try to think of an opening sentence that has some measure of energy, action or intrigue. For the Red Sabre stories, I’m looking for something that gives that sense of adventure. Anything that evokes the wildness of the wild west, gunpowder and railroads are all elements that I want to highlight to build intrigue. On the other hand, for the Nancy Sharpe mysteries, I’m largely looking to create incongruencies in a lighthearted manner. A line that can set the humorous tone and create a setup for a joke are elements that can generate interest in a comedic mystery. 

And these are generally things I’m considering from my very first draft. A shorthand for energetic, engaging starters that I will typically rely on are opening lines of dialogue. Nothing sparks immediate engagement like beginning a story in media res. If the reader is starting off in the middle of the action then you’ve got built in dynamism as well a source of curiosity while the reader tries and puzzles out what is happening while it’s happening. Dialogue fits just about any genre and is also “action” even if most people wouldn’t immediately think of it as such.

So when you’re starting a draft or editing a draft, ask yourself:

How am I going to immediately hook my reader’s attention? What’s an opening sentence that will create engagement and interest? Can this sentence also convey important tone or themes of the story as well? If I were to read this opening sentence in a bookstore, would it grab my attention? Would it make me want to keep reading?

Is this really the first and most important impression I want to make to my audience?