Sep14

Opening Lines

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Opening Lines

After a long summertime hiatus, I’m finally hard at work on Keepers of the Wellsprings, Book Four: Call of Hywilkin! Yay! I just started writing Chapter 5, with the working title “Inside the Wall.” Any idea what it could mean? I’ll give you a hint with the opening line of the book:

hywilkin-opening-line

If you’re a reader, you know how important a book’s opening line is. For authors, it’s something some of us really agonize over. It needs to set the tone for the entire book, and pull the reader in with enough information to tell what’s happening and leave you wanting more.

If you’re an author, I’d love for you to share your first line here, with a link to your book or website! If you’re a reader, sit back, enjoy the comments, and maybe you’ll open the door to your next big adventure!

23 responses »

  1. My first line is a work in progress. First lines are the hardest, it is the first mark you make on a blank document! For the moment, I will not put it up because my first line ticks none of the above boxes! I look forward to seeing others though 😀

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  2. When the Queen first ordered that her son be proclaimed “Shiva the Fourteenth,” it was already known to the high priest of the planet Deius that the infant would be the one to bring balance to the stars.

    – Shiva XIV, Book 1

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  5. Love that opening line, Missy! You can see what a descriptive writer you are in just a couple of sentences. Because we’re buds, I’ll post my opening line(s) from Shackles of Sunlight, but I’m not happy about how it looks compared to yours!

    Why had she stayed so late? Her hands, deep in her coat pockets, brushed against the folded paper. Oh yes, that was why. The poem. Her poem. The one he had written as a tribute to her beauty, or so he said. She had no illusions as to its true purpose, and to some extent it had been successful.

    And the link: https://amzn.com/B01HQBVHVQ

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  9. As for embracing a conventional way of life, Oncle Emil’s fervent wish for me to settle down had finally come to fruition. My uncle had made the ultimate self-sacrifice by settling and nearly succeeded in taking its surrounding secret to his grave were it not for a road hazard prompting him to spill the beans. And, I thought I’d mastered the art of cover-up!

    From the prologue of ‘An Enlightening Quiche,’ my upcoming Contemporary Women’s Fiction novel which will be available at Amazon in a matter of days.

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  10. “I’d like to thank the Nobel Committee for this award.”
    Geneva Price’s acceptance speech for the Peace Prize was interrupted by the shrill of the telephone. Her dreams of Scandinavians bearing gifts were shattered.

    From my light-hearted contemporary romantic novella The Lady Is a Mayor:

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  11. It was nineteen-fourteen in Canada. He was a professional hunter and trapper and like other predators hunted all year. Running trap lines when fur was best he converted the skins to cash, which provided the important supplies: twelve gauge loads and whisky.

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  19. “Amid the chaos of vendors and buyers the young man caught an instant’s gaze into a stranger’s eyes, a woman’s glance as he brushed past her and into the crowded marketplace that was the heart of fifteenth-century Lisbon.” First line of the first story in the short-story collection “Places of Time.”

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  20. “Ouch!” cried Baena, not for the first time.
    The others gathered in front of the circular assembly hall of Abernethy ignored her while the old man working on her wrist continued what he was doing. Baena considered whether to protest again. She had more sense than to actually flinch as the man inserted the needle and rubbed in the soot and copper. She’d seen enough marks ruined by careless movement to want to risk the intricate blue and black knot the old man was marking on her.
    The opening of ‘Kenneth’s Queen’ Available on Amazon relinks.me/B01E2Q3WE8

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  22. Here are a few of mine:

    Run from the Stars:
    Lieutenant Jane Gould pressed the button firmly and the stars began to go out. They faded first from the aft edge of the flight deck window, reddening and dwindling away as the field took hold. Then the orthodynamic drive lifted the ship right out of real space and she was looking at the other universe behind the darkness.

    Seek for the Stars:
    Lieutenant Jane Gould brought the spaceship still lower, running almost due east along the line of the broad, sandy beach. Her diamond-blue eyes scanned the vast, empty space, the paradise that had become an interstellar killing ground.

    Harnessing the Brane-Deer:
    “Fortunately,” said the young squadron leader as the Land Rover bumped across the moonlit airfield, tyres hissing through the sprinkling of snow, “all eight reindeer managed to eject before it hit the ground, or we’d be scraping diced venison off the runway.”

    Anniversary:
    They’ve named the spaceship after me. Look just below the Captain’s side window and you’ll see my name, Miriam F. Parr, in heat-resisting paint that can take endless re-entries. All because fifty years ago I told a NASA mission director that he was wrong.

    H-Cartridge:
    There was an empty H cartridge in an envelope in my pigeon hole. I pushed it guiltily into a pocket, praying that nobody else had seen it. I’d thought that I was the only person on Old Earth who knew what an H was, let alone carried an energy weapon that it fitted.

    Miss-Used Car:
    If Alison hadn’t tried to change the paper in the fax machine while eating a prawn sandwich none of it need have happened. But as she wrestled one-handed with the malignant mechanism a solitary drop of mayonnaise fell unheeded onto the new roll. Hours later, when the greasy patch passed under the machine’s printhead, it blurred one letter. A letter that any sensible reader would have deduced was a trivial typing error, a matter of pressing the key adjacent to the one intended. But it wasn’t really a typing error at all. The sentence, as it originally stood, was entirely correct. It was strange, perhaps even startling. But it did accurately reflect reality, its improbable veracity being the cause of the whole sorry affair.

    The Thirteenth Commandment:
    If you are reading this I am almost certainly dead, bound and slaughtered like an animal. I shall have paid with my life for my crimes, and Josephine Abigail Greene is no more.

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