One Liners

Okay, as promised, I'm going to talk a little bit about one liners. Maybe some readers or submission managers or whatever would disagree with me, but the opening few lines or paragraphs is virtually all I need to see of most books submitted to my agency. A few paragraphs can tell you a lot about the voice, pacing, construction, copy editing, consistency, and originality of a work. I have so much to say on the subject that I can't say it all at once, so I'll start from the beggining, the opening line itself.

First thing I should point out- any book or short story that opens with a normal person waking up on a normal day is almost guaranteed to get a form rejection from yours truly. I must read fifteen manuscripts a day that start with sounds of snoring, an alarm going off, or some truly uninspired dialogue like "Wake up honey or you'll be late for work." Let me set the record straight. Waking up is not interesting. Waking up as a bug might be, but Fraz Kafka beat you to that particular opening a hundred years ago. And when books start with waking up, they're usually slow to get going. If I have to read several pages and don't see a distinct voice, unusual character, or interesting premise, consider yourself gone. And most manuscripts that start with waking up prove themselves to be, at best, very slow boils. At worst, as they often are, they're BBB. That's Crewd shorthand for "bland, banal bullshit." Keep in mind, waking up is just the most common extraordinarily boring way to start a story. If you need to write it that way for your own sense of progression, fine. If you start writing and need to get a feel for the character, go ahead. But take it out of the final product.

Second- how does one make a good opening line and does it make a difference? To answer the second part first, yes. It absolutely does. Even a terrible manuscript, I'll read about five pages if it has a great opening line, hoping to see a little bit more of the skill that crafted that initial hook. Compared to the two page maximum I read of most books that start with waking up, that gets you somewhere. The more you can convince me to read, the more sympathetic I become to you, and your manuscript, and the more I like it.

So how do you make a good opening line? My personal favorite is the absurd. Something seemingly surreal, but makes perfect sense. Usually, it will hit the theme or climax of the story and it'll take us half the book to figure out just what it meant. I don't want to quote any of the authors who have queried me (even though most were rejects) because I'm really hoping to see those words on a professinally printed and bound page one day down the line and wouldn't want to ruin their best stuff by making it availible to just anyone. Instead, I'll use a few of my own because, lazy, talentless shmuck that I am, I never had a chance anyway. So, a good one line opening might be

"Old Two-Nose Paul, despite his nickname still couldn't tell when we were shitting him."

"The phrase 'hey baby, wanna get wet?' can be traced back to Poseidon, Greek God of the Oceans, for whom it was particularly unsucessful."

Or, if we were to go for a full on opening paragraph, one of my personal favorites is "I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of. I’ve lied. I’ve stolen. I’ve cheated. I’ve even killed a few people. But the worst thing I’ve done by far is to tell a strong willed woman there’s something she can’t do."

If you're not into non-sequitors, usually I find physical description is best. Indeed, I'm a satirist (if I may flatter myself) so non-sequitors are my method, but for serious works, literary or commercial, I often find a quick description of the scene best. Especially when placed in immediate contrast to the action of the story. For instance, a buoy floats gently in the bay in the cool, gray morning air. Beside it floats the bloated body of incumbent senator Mr. Blank. Something like that. That's not a cleaned up or streamlined version. Or be creative. I once had a middle aged lawyer staring at a clock he thought looked like a gravestone (a thought at odds with the work he was supposed to be doing). I can't give you endless lines, but starting with someone waking up or walking down the street is not a novel or even a short story. That's a Blues Song.

"I woke up this morning. Then I went back to bed...well I ain't got no money. I'm just walking down the road...I wish I could get me some money, but I forgot my automated telacode." - Weird Al Yankovich's Generic Blues.