The Art of Fiction:
Your Fiction’s Hardworking First Paragraph
Part II: Planting the Seeds

To see how this works, let’s get up and go to the bookshelves — mine, since they’re nearby.

Master Beginnings

Chances are, each of the beginnings below is very familiar to you. But as it’s likely you may not have considered them as containing the seeds for all that comes after, I’ll provide a bit of commentary following each.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Students love to cite the first line of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities to test my thesis. Couldn’t these lines apply to any moment in any era, past, present, or future? The answer is yes, of course they could. But for Dickens’ purposes, they plant the seeds for this particular novel, which is about not only what happens to its characters over the course of the French Revolution, but to the larger world. By utilizing this abstract and passive construction, Dickens alerts the reader to the fact that this book will be far more than a simple story of a few characters. Rather, it will be about the world as it was, as it is, and as it will be in a time that truly was “the best of times…(and) the worst of times.”

The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (this version comes from the more recent, and, I think, far more faithful to the original Russian, translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) appears similarly abstract on first reading. But like Dickens, Tolstoy’s themes concern far more than the lives of Anna and Vronsky, and Levin and Kitty. If you haven’t read Anna Karenina, this reference to Levin and Kitty has no doubt already thrown you. Their happy tale, however, is as much a part of this novel as Anna and Vronsky’s unhappier one, and Tolstoy’s first line refers to this as well.

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

Finally, all three of these first sentences signal an omniscient narrator. I’ll talk about this in my next column, when I show how your first paragraph establishes narrative voice.

Testing Myself

It would be disingenuous of me to insist that your first line carry as much weight as these long departed masters if it weren’t in fact something I practiced myself, so I’m going to discuss the first line of my novel Dissonance a bit to show that I do practice what I preach. Before I do, however, I’d like to remind you quickly that the first line you write in your first draft may not turn out to be the first line with which your fiction ultimately ends up.

The piano is unique among instruments for its double stroke.

This heavy-lifter does so much that it still amazes me that it came from my own pen. First, there’s the word “piano,” and both of my main characters are pianists. Second, there’s the word “unique,” which is meant to suggest the singularity of this particular fiction’s world. The words “among instruments” foreshadow a symphony one of the characters writes. And finally, there are the last two words, “double stroke,” which reflect he novel’s primary themes: what’s hidden, and the nature of duplicity, both internal and external.

Pretty nifty, huh?

Don’t Take My Word(s) for It

Pull out a few fictions from your own bookshelves and take a look at their first lines. (This won’t necessarily work as well with commercial fiction as it does with literary fiction, though I just checked the most recent Sue Grafton novel, S is for Silence, and found this: “When Liza Mellincamp thinks about the last time she ever saw Violet Sullivan…”, which is indeed what this entire book concerns.) It’s best to do this with books you’ve already read, so you can see how the seeds of all that follows are contained in each first line.

And the next step, of course, will be to make sure your own first lines do the very same thing.