What Makes A Good Beginning?

Hi everyone.

Happy New Year!

I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas, if you celebrate it of course, and as it’s now the beginning of another new year, I thought I’d pose the question “What makes a good beginning?” So if you’ve not already had enough quizzes over the festive period, you might like to have a go at seeing how many of these famous novels you can identify from their opening lines. Answers are at the end of the post if you want to put yourself out of your misery.

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

2. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

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

4. Call me Ishmael.

5. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

6. It was a pleasure to burn.

7. Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father.

8. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

9. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

10. It was the day my grandmother exploded.

How many of these have you read?

So what do those ten opening lines have in common? In order to answer that, I’ve come up with a list of criteria that, in my opinion anyway, make a good beginning. They can be applied not just to novels but to any piece of writing and you might like to check each of the above openings to see if they match at least one of my criteria.

1. Make the reader want to know more.

If you can immediately get your reader to start asking any of the “Who?”, “Why?”, “When?” “Where?” and best of all, “What the hell is going on?” type of questions, then you’ve probably already drawn them in before they’ve even reached the next sentence.

2. Start with a compelling image.

The opening of any piece of writing shouldn’t be an “information dump” and too much description at this stage is not really required. But an image that focuses on sensory details such as sight, sound, taste etc can be a great way of hooking in your reader.

3. Subvert a well-worn phrase.

Clichés are best avoided at any point in your writing but definitely at the beginning. If you can manage to say something in your opening lines that has probably never been said before than you may well be onto a winner.

There are an awful lot of words in this book.

4. Have the main character introduce themselves.

Setting up a character in your reader’s mind with just a few opening words can be an effective way of creating an immediate bond between reader and protagonist. The reader quickly feels a connection to this person and wants to know more about them.

5. Open with something unexpected.

If you can take your reader in a completely different direction than the one they may have been expecting and hit them with a beginning that can surprise or shock, you can be fairly certain that you have immediately piqued their interest and they will want to read more.

6. Build A Convincing World.

Grounding your reader as quickly as you can with a sense of time and place as well as genre can make them feel more secure and therefore more inclined to read on. You don’t need to give everything away at the start, just enough for them to know when and where the story is taking place.

Now why not try applying some of these criteria to your own writing?

I do hope the author has built a convincing world.

And if you want to see how well you did with those opening lines, here are the answers, unless you’ve already googled them, of course!

1. 1984 (George Orwell)

2. I Capture The Castle (Dodie Smith)

3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

4. Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

5. The Go-Between (L.P. Hartley)

6. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

7. Oranges Are Not The Ony Fruit (Jeanette Winterson)

8. Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)

9. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

10. The Crow Road (Iain Banks)

How did you get on? You can let me know in the comments below.