Larry M. Coleman

Twenty years ago, way back in 2006 when things still got printed, American Book Review published a list of what they considered the 100 best first lines from novels. It will probably take 20-30 minutes to read the list if you’re actually reading instead of skimming. That’s okay: good reading isn’t a timed sport. You don’t have to do a close read; the intent is to let 80 great lines (20% of them are crap, but which ones those twenty are will be different for you than for me) infuse your brain.

Read it here and then come back.

Now that you’re back, are you inspired to write your masterpiece? If so, great! You don’t need to read the rest of this because Fiction Inspiration Friday has done its job.

If not, think about which ones grabbed you and then think about why that was. For example, here are five of my picks:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

This launches us immediately into immediacy, then throws us back into an intriguingly remote memory, making us wonder how the two can possibly relate. It’s been 17 years since I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude and I still remember the experience. It changed the way I think about literature. Not in a craft sense or any other technical sense; it transformed what literature is to me. It raised the bar for everything I’d ever read afterward.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
—George Orwell, 1984

What I admire about this one is the care Orwell took in choosing the time. What’s special about 1:00 p.m.? Nothing in particular except that it is the unlucky number 13, already giving us a touch of dystopia.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
—Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler

How deceptively simple. Think of what a bold, slippery idea it is to insert yourself as the author in the very first sentence while also putting us in the second person with “You are…” In one sentence, we’re already running in parallel frames, both reading the novel and reading about reading the novel. It reminds me of one of my favorite short (and I mean short: it’s just over 600 words) stories by Julio Cortázar, “The Continuity of Parks.”

Another reason this one stands out to me is simply that it’s Italo Calvino. I love few books the way I love his novel Invisible Cities. If I were on a ship that was sinking and I could only grab five books to read on whatever island I end up running out the rest of my days on, they would be Invisible Cities, the complete poems of Pablo Neruda, Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, Pale Fire by Nabokov, and a large blank notebook because any empty notebook is a novel if you’ve got enough time and ink.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“The sun shone…” That’s nice. Nothing special, but nice. “…having no alternative…” Oh, that’s a dreary layer added quickly. “…on the nothing new.” Perfection. It’s hard to do better and/or more with only ten words, although Beckett is on the list again with “Where now? Who now? When now?” from The Unnameable.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

As I said above, Pale Fire would be one of my five books to read forever. There’s precisely one novel that starts with a thousand-line poem but is actually a novel, and it’s this one.

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If this hasn’t gotten you into writing something, then use one of these openings as a springboard into a story of your own. Take one of them and then write the next sentence after it. Then the next sentence after that, and so on. Then when you’re done, you can lop off the first sentence and you still have a story. Here is a trio of openers that all have the same shifty feel to get you started:

In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
—John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

It was like so, but wasn’t.
—Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

All this happened, more or less.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

But if I had to pick one and only one to use as a crowbar to pry open the box of creativity, it would be this one:

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
—Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

Now go tell that story, bit by bit. Good luck and have fun!