First Lines

"The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami."

I'm a fan of first sentences. I love to open a book and read the opening sentence, close my eyes and savor the thoughts and feeling it generates. Often I will decide whether or not to continue reading based on my little meditation of the first sentence.

Above is the first sentence of Tom Robbins' first novel, Another Roadside Attraction. It's my favorite first line of any book I've ever read. I had to read it several times before I could continue with the story. It is vivid, surprising, mysterious and seductive. I laughed out loud, causing looks of consternation from the other patrons of the cafe I was sitting in.

I am more of a writer of songs than I am a writer of prose, although I am prolific at neither. I know many songwriters who can sit down at any time and create. They write and re-write and polish and spend days or weeks on a single song. I'm not like that. I cannot complete a song unless I get the right first line. I may have the musical structure and even a melody line, but without that perfect first line, it never becomes a song.

I've tried to work the other way. I've been to writing seminars and classes where I have been instructed to write on a given theme. I've never been very successful in those endeavors (success meaning that I'm pleased with my efforts and I'm willing to actually sing the song more than once). I guess I just don't have that kind of patience. If the first line isn't perfect, nothing that comes after will be either. I've thrown away many songs and essays, after struggling for hours or days with them. Stillborn children they seem to be, and no amount of resuscitation will re-animate them.

And yet, with a great first line, the rest of the writing flows with out any effort at all. Some of my best liked songs (by myself and others) took considerably less that an hour to compose. Once, while in college I wrote a 25 page essay on the Irish contribution to Roman Catholicism, with references and footnotes in an afternoon. All because of a great first line.