It’s time to give
the plot away. Well, not completely. But some effective first lines do
summarize the story.
Here is the
opening paragraph from Pride and
Prejudice by Jane Austin:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single
man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
And what is the
story about? Convincing rich single men that they want wives.
Or consider this
paragraph that opens the story proper in From
the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.*
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the
old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger
with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were
untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the
cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just
running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a
comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And
that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Can you guess what
this story is about? A girl runs away and hides at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City.
Telling the whole
story can work for nonfiction as well. Here is the first paragraph of The Glass Castle, which is a memoir
written by Jeannette Walls.
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had
overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting
through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the
steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with
their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where
I was heading.
Here, you need only
the first sentence to get the heart of the story. Jeannette grew up rooting
through Dumpsters for her meals. She rose above that lifestyle, but her parents
still embraced it.
So why do these
openings work? They give the essence of the story without revealing the
details. We know that Claudia is going to run away from home and hide at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, but we don’t know how long she can stay hidden or
why she is running away in the first place. We read on because we want to know
exactly what happened.
As with other
types of openings, however, this one also has its pitfalls. You may even
recognize them since they are similar to the ones for foreshadowing. The
opening may give away too much, or it may make promises that it doesn’t keep. I
think it is also the hardest type of opening to write.
There are other
types of opening lines besides the ones discussed in this series, but these are
the five that, as a reader, I have found to be the most effective. Now it’s
your turn to find the one that works best for your story.
__________
* Technically,
this isn’t the beginning of From the
Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The book starts with a cover
letter from Mrs. Frankweiler to her lawyer. However, the quote begins the
actual story.
