"Call me Ishmael"

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

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

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

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

"124 was spiteful."

"It was a pleasure to burn."

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

I've been giving a lot of thought to opening lines lately.  When I first met my husband, he told me that when he picks up a book, it isn't the cover that makes it or breaks it for him--it's the opening line.  He reads one sentence and then makes a decision.

I thought he was nuts.  After all, if I'd stopped after "I am an invisible man" and considered it too obvious, I may never have breathed through the masterpiece that is Ellison's novel (and one of my husband's favorites, by the way).  What if I had indeed dismissed it by the first line?

Yet the truth is that, like it or not, opening lines matter.  For some novels, it's all the majority of people know about it (Moby Dick comes to mind); for others, it is the line that continues to resonate long after the cover has been closed.  The opening line sets the tone, the narrative voice, and the style.  A lot hinges on those carefully chosen words.

The opening line of Sweet Divinity reads: "One of my earliest memories of my mother involves pot leaves and sprinkles of dirt raining from the heavens".  At various points it was: "One of my earliest memories of my mom involved pot leaves raining from the sky" and "When I think of my mother, I see pot leaves falling from the sky."

Miranda begins this way: "It is an uncommon sight to observe a young woman vanish into the sea."  It originally read something like, "It is a sight uncommon to watch a young woman disappear into the water."

Visions and revisions...searching for the most precise words, for the appropriate tone, for the exact voice one hears in her mind.

Different tones, different voices, different novels.  All made clear by the opening lines.

As I begin work on my next project, I'm keenly aware that the opening line matters. And so I will craft, and recraft, until it is just right...until my husband says he would definitely read that book.