I have a friend named Charles, who is a biophysicist, a professor, a songwriter, a musician (guitar, bagpipes, and God knows what else), a poet, and a writer of short fiction. He reads James Joyce and Jose Saramago for fun. He’s been known to brew his own beer.
He’s not a great poker player, but he’s probably not trying very hard.
Charles is also responsible for the title of Something Missing. Although he doesn’t know it yet, he also makes a brief appearance as a character in my upcoming novel that he may also assign a title to.
Charles is a methodical writer, often making me feel like a lazy, good-for-nothing vomiter of words (though I have not actually vomited since 1983). He has worked for weeks on a single sentence, ensuring that it is just right. When I ask him how a story is progressing, he says things like, “I’ve got four sentences now!”
Yesterday, I sent him the first sentence of my new work-in-progress, Chicken Shack. I’m quite proud of this collection of words. I actually wrote the sentence a few weeks ago when the seed of this story was first planted in my mind, but I was waiting to finish revisions on my previous novel before committing it to digital print. Charles made one suggestion, but otherwise approved of the sentence.
The story is now hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sentences long. I’ll be finished with the first chapter by the end of today. But here is the first, which includes Charles’s minor revision:
They tried not to receive corpses on the same day as chicken, but since it was impossible to predict when a logger might fall from his bucket truck and break his neck, the two deliveries occasionally coincided.
In Something Missing, the first sentence was designed to bring the reader immediately into the precision and minutia of Martin Railsback, whose life is predicated on mountains of precise minutia.
In my upcoming novel, the first sentence sets the stage for the entire book. It is the moment upon which the entire story hinges.
Both are sentences in which the protagonist takes relatively ordinary actions that ultimately lead to extraordinary results. The first line of Chicken Shack is entirely different.
But hopefully as successful.
Just for the record, my wife’s favorite first line comes from Pride and Prejudice. It is:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
I have no definite favorite, though I am partial to the first line of Slaughterhouse-Five:
“All this happened, more or less.”
Also, Fahrenheit 451:
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
Lastly, Charlotte’s Web:
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”
Does anyone want to share their favorites?
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I have always liked the first sentence of the Christmas Carol:
Marley was dead, to begin with.
and also really like Saramago’s latest (from “Death with Interruptions”):
The following day, no one died.
(These two sentences both have six words bisected by a comma. I just realized this today. And, upon further inspection, there is a lot more similarity between these sentences!)
(Interstingly, all three of your sentences also have six words. Maybe we should only be starting novels with six word first sentences?)
Wow. Interesting. Makes me worry about the first sentence of my new book. Much longer than six sentences.
It is great that people are thinking about the environment and working to make the world a safer place. Not only the materials that you are using on your home are safe for the environment but dump trucks have come a long way since the earlier models. We are learning and expanding and coming up with a wide range of safer more effective vehicles for the work force. I think it is great that many auto manufacturers are turning to hybrid vehicles to protect the environment and now they are even using hybrid dump trucks.
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