I mean, should a writer drive himself into a first sentence-envy frenzy- a paralysis - that keeps them from proceeding to the next paragraph because they didn't write that classic, oft-quoted first line? Come on, true readers know what I'm talking about. Think about the classics, the one you can pull out of your pocket at any time:
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
-Hunter Thompson, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."
-Vladimir Nobokov, Lolita
"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."
-Chuck Pahalniuk, Fight Club
"All this happened, more or less."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
First lines are a Jeopardy! category. First lines are the bellboys at the door of the hotel, asking you to come in and stay a while. First lines are a fuse the writer lights on the first page what follows will either be a spark, a dud, or a an explosion which leaves your ears ringing for days.
But do they really matter?
Here are some of the first lines I've written and have been published. A link to each story is attached, so I suppose if you click on it, that means it worked.
"The specimen is Sam Tuley, chosen not just for his overzealous sex drive, penchant for alcohol and violence, and inability to make the most of a second chance, but rather because, try as he might, he will forever be damned to a hospital bed with tubes going in and out of him."
"On the third night of rain, we reckoned about thirteen or so Negroes were gone."
"The motel had a washer and dryer, so Melinda Kendall thought it best to take advantage and get after her clothes before they got out of hand."
"Miles Del Riccio stepped out onto his front lawn as the sun peeed over the horizon and was surprised to see his newspaper waiting for him."
Here's some that are available either in print or e-book.
"A woman shielded her baby from the rain."
"The book ended no different this time than it had the previous seven he'd read it." (This story is also being turned into a film directed by Christopher G. Moore.)
"A car full of jailbait whizzed past like a rocket and beeped its horn until it screamed up and down the neighborhood."
In this digital age, battles are waged for the attention span of readers and the first line stands at the front lines. If any of those above got you to click on the link to view the story, then they must have done a good job. Editors, publishers and agents all want to be wowed by that first line and many writers tell horror stories of how stories fall rejected by the failure to capture a reader by the first line.
Curious, I went back to some of the books that "kept me up until five because all their stars are out, and for no other reason." Did these books have some knock-down, drag-out first line that blew the doors off the fiction? You be the judge.
6. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
This is one of the coolest books out there. The premise: brother and sister have relations then have a baby and brother sells the baby to a traveling salesman. Sister goes after the salesman, brother goes
