Favourite opening lines

Eight writers tell SINÉAD GLEESONhow they write the opening line of a novel, and suggest their favourites

ARAVIND ADIGA

My favourite opening line is from Albert Camus's The Stranger: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.". It's punchy, colloquial, and disturbing. It also taps out a rhythm for the rest of the book. Another would be from Swann's Wayby Proust: "For a long time I went to sleep early." It reverses the basic expectation with which you start a novel – to see activity, thought, or change of some kind. Instead you fall straight into sleep and the underworld. It's hypnotic. First lines – and first pages – are so important when you're unpublished and trying to get an agent or publisher's attention. You know that she won't look past a page or two, so you're trying to pack as much as you can into the opening sentence. When I began writing, I assumed that first sentences had to be flamboyant; unexpected; long and dazzling to the reader and also encoded cunningly with the big themes of the book. You began with a Douglas Fairbanks-meets-Michel Foucault sort of first line. I no longer think that. The point of the first sentence of a book is to get someone to read the second sentence. I think the real unit is the first page and not the first sentence. I do spend a lot of time on the first page, and I try to make it interesting enough so that someone browsing in a store would, on the basis of the first page, consider buying my book.

Aravind Adiga is the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger

CATHERINE O’FLYNN

I find the first line is like every other line in the book, I force myself to get something down and then I go back and revise it many times. I think more difficult and more significant than first lines are closing lines – even of each chapter or section. They feel to me as if they need to carry more weight. Although I know what I want the first scene to be, it isn't the first thing I write, instead I start at a random point in the middle somewhere. Now I think about it, that seems a needlessly complicated thing to do. Maybe I should be like Woody Allen's character in Manhattan– lying on my sofa, speaking into a dictaphone: "She adored Birmingham. She idolised it out of all proportion." I don't have a favourite first line. If I like a book, I tend not to notice or remember its first line as I've already sprinted past it and I'm on my way somewhere else. When I look back though, I love the opening lines of pretty much every Kurt Vonnegut novel I've ever read. Here's Deadeye Dick: "To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life."

Catherine O'Flynn's second novel, The News Where You Are, is published in July

PATRICK McCABE

As regards labour, usually the first line of any book is the last one I write. A first line for me is not a starting point. I always start with a combination of words that encapsulate a mood or a feeling or an atmosphere and it doesn't have to mean anything. I think one of my favourite opening lines is "Call Me Ishmael," from Moby Dickor maybe "Mother died today. . ." from The Stranger. Forcing oneself to write a first sentence could not only hold up a book but ruin it. However forcing oneself to sit down and write is a different thing just so long as you can relax when you have done that. As regards the actual writing of the first line when everything else is in place, all the characters placed appositely in their sealed world of fiction, the first line should run out of your hand and rivet itself into place, smiling back at you as if to say: "what makes you think you had anything to do with this?" Which indeed maybe you hadn't – not by that stage anyway. Nabokov and Ford claim that their characters always act as galley slaves, nothing more. I think mine – such as they are – are the opposite, and are working away at their hardest when I'm asleep.

Patrick McCabe's latest novel is The Holy City(2009)

DAVID MITCHELL

I labour over first lines as much as I labour over any line – and it is also a place to begin. Sometimes I write the first line first; sometimes I don't, but by the time I've finished it hardly matters: I will have polished, cut, amended, added to, deleted, edited, tweaked and put the first line back to how it was before many times. Then at the proof-reading stage I might decide it's gone stale and import a completely new first line anyway. Every single line matters, but the first line is the reader's first impression. It's like meeting a potential partner across a table at a speed-dating conference: here is your one free opportunity for your book to make an impression on the reader, to make him or her want to know more. Good opening lines have no secret because they come in so many shapes and sizes: sharp-talking and smart; visual and visceral; remarkable in its ordinariness; a mood-setter or a world-definer; a puzzle asking for an answer; a hook; or a subtler hook that the reader doesn't even notice. One favourite is from Bleak House, though I'm cheating slightly by including the first fragments until we get to the dinosaur: "London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Biblical floods! Megalosauruses! Holborn Hill! And even the Lord Chancellor. This is a hook opener, you know it's a hook, and you think, "Reel me in . . ."

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoetis published next month. David Mitchell will be appearing at the 2010 Dublin Writers Festival on Wednesday, June 2

EVIE WYLD

The first time I write the first line of anything, the only thing I'm interested in is getting an idea of a voice. I'm not sure I've written anything where the original first line has stayed the same once the work is finished. I never start writing fiction with much of an idea of what the plot will be, or who it will be about, I do all my thinking about the story on the page, so inevitably things change along the way. I think the first line is important – I find beginnings very difficult, reading them and writing them. You have to deal with the fact that you are jumping from real life into an imagined world with no run-up, so the voice has to be there straight away and the reader has to trust it to take them through into the story. I love the first line of The Idea of Perfectionby Kate Grenville: "In his ex-wife's clever decorating magazines Douglas Cheeseman had seen mattress ticking being amusing." It's so funny and the voice and tone is right there. You feel like you're set up to read a really wonderful funny book – which you are. All in all, though, I don't think there is one part of a novel that is more important than the rest. It's balancing them all together so that you don't have a big exciting wow of a first line and then a quiet, internal novel behind it.

Evie Wyld's debut novel, After the Fire, A Still, Small Voiceis shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize for new writers

PAUL MURRAY

It pretty much goes without saying that the first line of a book is really important. When you're a young, unpublished writer you hear all the time that agents and editors won't keep reading a manuscript if the first line is bad, so you learn early on, whatever problems the rest of the book might have, to make sure that first line is good. In terms of the novel itself the first sentence has to do a lot of work – it needs to grab the reader's attention, and also it needs to encapsulate in some way what the book is about. That said, you probably shouldn't get too obsessed with it, at least not until you've finished the rest of the book. There's a character in an Albert Camus novel who's trying to write a book, but he's such a perfectionist that he can't get beyond that first line. As for my own work, well, the opening line of Skippy Dies, the novel that just came out, I like: "Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening, when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair". It's a long time since I began work on that book, but as far as I remember it's the first thing that came to me. Sometimes that'll happen; a line will come to you more or less complete and serve as a springboard for the story that follows. Other times the line that begins the novel might be added quite late in the process, when you've finally figured out what your book is about. I don't have a great memory for opening lines, but the first line of Gravity's Rainbowis terrific: "A screaming comes across the sky." The image of anonymous terror nicely sets up the phantasmagoria that follows. Ali Smith's novel Hotel Worldalso has a brilliant opening: "Woooooooo-hooooooo"– that's the narrator crying out as she falls down an elevator shaft.

Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray, has been shortlisted for the 2010 PG Wodehouse prize for a comic novel

ARLENE HUNT

I would not want a first line to be as dull as dishwater, but honestly it is not the be all and end all for me. I don't fear the blank screen; I'm usually itching to go. I usually write the first line first, but it might change over the course of the book as the story takes on a life of its own. I don't think it matters more than plot or character development – certainly not in a crime novel. More than once I've changed or edited a first line, but only to suit the arc of the fledgling as it develops and grows into a fully formed story. A great first line is something that can grab you and make you salivate for more. I burst out laughing when I read the opening of Geek Loveby Katherine Dunn, but I was also intrigued to know what on earth could be going on. "'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of niggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'"

Arlene Hunt's latest novel is Blood Money

ROSS RAISIN

I don't really see the first line as being a particularly special, or distinct, component of a novel. That said, when I am browsing in a book shop, I will of course read first lines, paragraphs, pages, and to some extent my decision to buy will be based on that, so it's not like they don't matter. However, if a writer is trying to do something too flashy or clever with the first line, that juts out from what follows, it is off-putting. More important is to have consistency of narrative and use that first line to establish a strong and compelling narrative voice that doesn't waver from first line to last. As such, I don't generally remember many first lines. The ones I do remember, in fact, tend to be quite understated: "The newspaper did not say much," from The Grass is Singingby Doris Lessing, immediately sets up not only the gloomy tone, but also the judgemental intrusiveness of the narrator. And the first line of Disgrace(JM Coetzee) establishes right away the control and precision that impresses through the whole book: "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."

Ross Raisin's novel  God's Own Country is nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award