“Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.” “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” These are the sentences that say: Listen. In looking for the best opening lines, we took all of this into consideration. First sentences, of course, have different functions-to amuse, to frighten, to mystify-and the mechanics a writer uses to achieve this connection vary from genre to genre.
There are thousands of classic opening lines in fiction- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison come to mind-but often the most well-known are not always the best.
An appealing voice achieves an intimate connection - a bond much stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted writing. But they don’t come for the story, or even for the characters. People come to books looking for something. You hear people talk about “voice” a lot, when I think they really just mean “style.” Voice is more than that. But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You want to know about this.” The first sentence sets the stage-however long or short the text-and hints at the “narrative vehicle” by which the writer will propel the book forward. “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story,” he said. In a 2013 interview with Joe Fassler, horror fiction maestro Stephen King reflected on the magnitude of a novel’s introductory sentence.
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