The first lineis a promise.

1. I

   Start with a disturbance

   Not necessarily an explosion — a tilted fact. Something is already in motion, already wrong, already desired. If the world of the book could continue unchanged after this sentence, the sentence is not yet working.

2. II

   Let voice do the heavy lifting

   Information is cheap. A mind on the page is not. Prefer a speaker with an attitude — wary, amused, exhausted, devout — over a camera hovering above a street. Voice is how a reader decides they can stand 80,000 more words of you.

3. III

   Be specific enough to be believed

   Abstractions (‘it was a time of great change’) ask to be skipped. Concrete nouns and verbs ask to be seen. A gymnasium that used to be a gymnasium. Clocks striking thirteen. An axe in a father’s hand. Particulars are persuasion.

4. IV

   Open a question, not an explanation

   The first line’s job is to make the second line necessary. If you have already answered who, where, why, and how, there is nowhere to go. Leave a gap the reader is compelled to close.

5. V

   Match the contract to the book

   A comic novel should not open like a funeral unless the joke is the funeral. A middle-grade story should not flex adult irony. A thriller can be quiet, but it cannot be idle. The opening must sell the book you actually wrote, not the book you admire.

6. VI

   Cut the throat-clearing

   Waking up. The weather, unless the weather is the plot. Looking in a mirror to catalogue a face. ‘Little did they know.’ Dictionary definitions. Prologues that apologise for starting. If the story has not begun, delete until it has.

• voiceAdventure

  Call me Ishmael.

  Moby-Dick·Herman Melville, 1851

  Three words, and a speaker is already negotiating identity. The invitation is intimate, the borrowed name is not, and the reader has a person to follow before a single whale appears.

• themeLiterary

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

  Pride and Prejudice·Jane Austen, 1813

  The line sounds like a proverb and behaves like a trap. Austen’s irony is the contract: this will be a novel about what society claims, and what people actually want.

• worldScience fiction

  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four·George Orwell, 1949

  Ordinary weather, then a clock that cannot exist in the world we know. The thirteenth strike is the whole dystopia in one detail — no lecture required.

• timeLiterary

  Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

  One Hundred Years of Solitude·Gabriel García Márquez, 1967

  Death and wonder occupy the same breath. The sentence folds a life into one memory, and the reader is already asking how a man under rifles got there from ice.

• shockScience fiction

  It was a pleasure to burn.

  Fahrenheit 451·Ray Bradbury, 1953

  A moral reversal in six words. Pleasure attached to destruction makes the reader complicit before they know what is burning — and that unease is the engine of the book.

• worldScience fiction

  The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

  Neuromancer·William Gibson, 1984

  Setting as simile, and the simile is technology. Before a character speaks, the planet already feels used, electric, and slightly broken.

• placeLiterary

  124 was spiteful.

  Beloved·Toni Morrison, 1987

  A house number with a grudge. Morrison gives the building a will, so the haunting is grammatical before it is spectral — place as character, in three words.

• mysteryLiterary

  The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

  The Secret History·Donna Tartt, 1992

  The corpse is named like a friend, the weather is incidental, and the narrator is already in a ‘we’. You keep reading to learn who killed Bunny, and why they still sound so calm.

• worldScience fiction

  We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

  The Handmaid's Tale·Margaret Atwood, 1985

  A familiar room, stripped of its purpose. ‘Had once been’ is the whole regime: the world you know has been converted, and sleep is already political.

• invitationFantasy

  In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

  The Hobbit·J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937

  A fairy-tale cadence, a new word, and a promise of comfort about to be disturbed. The line teaches you how to say ‘hobbit’ by making you want one.

• placeGothic

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

  Rebecca·Daphne du Maurier, 1938

  Dream, return, and a house with a name. The sentence is homesick and locked out at once — Manderley is already more famous than the narrator who cannot keep away.

• mysteryChildren's

  Where's Papa going with that axe?

  Charlotte's Web·E.B. White, 1952

  A child’s question, and the book’s subject, in seven words. No throat-clearing, no sunrise: the axe is already in motion, and a young reader has a reason to be afraid.

• themeLiterary

  The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

  The Go-Between·L.P. Hartley, 1953

  An essay that is also a warning. Before a plot exists, the novel has told you its subject — memory as exile — in a sentence people still steal because it is true.

• themeChildren's

  All children, except one, grow up.

  Peter Pan·J.M. Barrie, 1911

  A rule, then the exception that is the story. The comma does the magic: childhood is universal, and one refusal will cost everybody something.

• voiceLiterary

  When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

  The Road·Cormac McCarthy, 2006

  Habit instead of event — ‘he’d reach out’ is a ritual, not a one-off. Tenderness is the first fact of a ruined world, and the prose has already taken its vow of plainness.

• voiceLiterary

  I am an invisible man.

  Invisible Man·Ralph Ellison, 1952

  A paradox stated as biography. The narrator claims a condition you will spend the novel learning to see, and the first-person ‘I’ makes invisibility intimate rather than theoretical.

Famous lines are the finished article. For a working notebook, see the twenty-eight opening lines I tried before The Sphinx Scrolls was published.