The Write Stuff: 10 Great First Lines

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What constitutes a great first line? Let’s first look at some examples.

How many the first lines below do you recognize? Do you know their sources?  (I will put the answers at the bottom of the article.)    

Ten Nifty, Great, or Memorable First Lines:  

1. "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure."

2. “This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.”

3. “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”

4. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

5. “Now is the winter of our discontent.”

6. “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.”

7. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.”

8. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

9. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.”

10. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”   


Ernest Hemingway wrote something in A Moveable Feast that I think of often. He was speaking of his own writer’s block, and although he was referring to the first moment of writing, I also read his comment in relation to first lines.

Hemingway wrote that he would tell himself, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I think about this when I write the first sentence of a story, an article, or an essay. I might think about it when I write my first sentence of the day. At the end, when I return to the beginning to revise, it is that penetrating truth I seek.  

When I begin with the truest sentence I know, it is never wrong. And to take it further, typically that sentence packs a punch.  

Do the first lines above pack a punch? I think so. They also capture the “truth” of the works they introduce. These elements—punch and truth—make them nifty, great, or memorable to me.   

Here are sources of the above first lines:  

1. Albert Camus, “The Stranger”
2. Kurt Vonnegut, “Breakfast of Champions”
3. Jay McInerny, “Bright Lights, Big City”
4. Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”
5. William Shakespeare, “Richard III”
6. Richard Brautigan, “In Watermelon Sugar”
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
8. J.D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”
9. Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
10. Jeffrey Eugenides, “Middlesex”  


Final thought: I am not okay with Vonnegut’s misuse of the word “which.”



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