Editor Deej: On Opening Lines

With examples, and an object lesson

Once upon a time, over a decade ago, a gentleman released unto the world a book that he was absolutely sure was the greatest book ever written.

Except that it was no such thing.

People who read the book, or attempted to, tried to explain to him. This convinced him that there was a worldwide atheist-internet conspiracy to destroy his historical work of genius and prevent the Oscar-winning Hollywood film adaptation from even getting made.¹

Amazon used to allow comments on reviews. One review on this book revealed, eventually, that there was a limit on how many comments one review could have, and that number was ten thousand. There were ten thousand comments on that review because the author Would Not Accept that he might be wrong, or that disagreement with him was even possible (except to the inferior and the dishonest, of course).

Deej was there, Gandalf, when the strength of Amazon failed.²

I (that is, Deej) must warn you: the book and the author are subjects that can and will suck up time and energy, so think thrice before going down that rabbit hole. But a little understanding is important because, well, this post is repurposed from a book project I decided not to pursue.

My plan was to use the book mentioned as an example and a warning: What Not To Do As An Indie Author, And How Not To Do It, more or less.

The book was called Empress Theresa, and the author’s name is Norman Boutin. As near as anyone can tell, it’s basically the power fantasy of a frustrated elderly narcissist who had an obsession with Joan of Arc, and decided to show the world how the world is supposed to be through fiction. The story is quite insane, on top of being badly written.

If you wish to know more, Down the Rabbit Hole has a fifteenish minute video on it³. The proprietor of DtRH, Fredrik Knudsen, also did a three-plus-hour livestream, where he began by reading the author’s essay on Joan of Arc⁴ and then did a live reading of the chapters the author had up on his website, culminating in Knudsen having a very understandable meltdown and walking off the livestream in frustration.

And if that isn’t enough of a deep dive for you, Krimson Rogue did a stunningly in-depth review of the book, in five parts, with the first part here. (There is also a Fandom Wiki on the book, for the truly stout of heart.)

But let me urge you, strenuously, not to go down that rabbit hole. You will be a happier camper. All you really need know is that Empress Theresa is a very badly written power fantasy featuring a Mary Sue who is a narcissistic monster.

So, all that preamble out of the way, I wrote the following about how to do an opening line of a novel. It remains Empress Theresa-heavy, but even that, I think, remains instructive.

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There is a mythology around first lines of novels, a sort of idealized notion that they should be extraordinarily meaningful and insightful and poetic and whatever else occurs to you that sounds like A Good Thing as you’re talking about them.

In fact, the first line of a novel has one job. If it fails that job, nothing else matters. If it accomplishes that job, then doing more than that is gravy—nice to have, but not the essential element.

The job is simple to state: make the reader want to keep reading.

That’s it. It doesn’t have to be memorable or quotable or a deep philosophical insight. It can be any of these things, but they are subordinate to making the reader want to keep reading.

Here is the first line of Empress Theresa:⁵

I’m Theresa, the only child of Edward and Elizabeth Sullivan, and I hope it’s not bragging to say I was cute as heck at age ten.

Taken on its own, this could be made to work, but not in the way that the author wants.

This will evoke two reactions, for the most part. The reader will either think, “So what?” Or, worse, “My, you are full of yourself, aren’t you, Theresa?”

Here’s the rest of the paragraph:

Everybody in the family said so. I was the princess in the Sullivan clan of Framingham, Massachusetts because besides being cute I was a whiz in school and had a good disposition. All the relatives expected great things from me.

The problem here is that Boutin wants the reader to accept this at face value. He wants the reader to think that Theresa is cute and smart and full of potential.

That’s not what readers will take from this opening. What they take from it is she is a narcissistic little monster who believes that the world centers on her, and that it should center on her.

There is nothing in this opening that actually tells us about her in a good way. She doesn’t tell us about a thing that happened, or something that interests her, or something that irritates her. She only tells us how wonderful she is, and how much other people agree that she is wonderful, with no substance backing it up.

(Also, the word should be “wiz”, short for wizard, not “whiz”, but the character might not know that. Which only adds to the impression that she is shallow.)

Boutin wants readers to know that Theresa is a good girl, and to admire her. Instead, he makes them dislike her immediately.

There is more to writing than just telling people things directly. Readers won’t simply feel the way you tell them to feel. They will react to how they are told things, and form their own judgments about what you tell them. And if you try to tell them how to judge, you will end up very frustrated, as Boutin has been learning ever since he published Empress Theresa.

As I said above, the first line could work, but only if the story was about a vapid, self-centered girl who learned in the rest of the book to get over herself.

Since the rest of the book has everybody telling the rest of the world to shut up and do what she says, and yet the reader is supposed to love and admire her and be awestruck at how good she is, no, it doesn’t work.

Can we replace it with something that does work? Yes.

While the first four chapters need to be cut, let’s begin by assuming that they’ll stay, and see what we can come up with for a first line that works better than the one that’s there.

Even keeping the first chapter, we need to start with something that will draw the reader into the book, which means we need to restructure the chapter a bit. Opening with, “Hi, I’m me, and you’d better believe I’m amazing!” won’t work.

What will?

Let’s look at a few examples of effective first lines, and see how they work.

(An aside: Norman Boutin holds the snobbish belief that only Great Literature is of any value. He would probably object with, “But Dickens did this!” and get very angry that anyone would still dare disagree with him after he invoked a Great Name. The answer to which, which Boutin would ignore or dismiss, is that Dickens died 150 years ago, and so did the audience he was writing for. Yes, people still read him, but we’re going to look at writers who are still read today, outside of school requirements. Some dead, some living, but all still popular with today’s readers.)

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The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.

That’s from Blood Rites by Jim Butcher, the sixth in his long-running Dresden Files series, and I would argue one of the most impressive openings ever, because it works equally well for readers new to the series and for those who have read every book up to this point.

If you’ve never read the series, you’ve immediately got danger, and you’ve got a curiously defensive narrator. Why, the reader will wonder, at least subconsciously, does the narrator feel it important to assure me that it wasn’t his fault?

(Readers of the series to date will be laughing, loudly, remembering the six or seven buildings Harry has already burned down, mostly by accident.)

The new reader will read on to find out what kind of a character Harry is. Longtime readers will read on to find out how he got himself into a mess this time.

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The eyewitness said he didn’t actually see it happen.

That’s from Lee Child’s A Wanted Man, a recent book in his long-running Jack Reacher series. It’s a thriller series, usually with a strong mystery element.

And it begins by immediately giving the reader a mystery: how can one be an eyewitness to something he didn’t see? That’s a contradiction any mystery reader will want to know the solution to. Not to mention the question: eyewitness to what?

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If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.

That’s how Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Double Star opens, and as usual with Heinlein, it’s a great opening. Not only does it make the reader think, “Wait, why?”—a question answered immediately and humorously in a way that also tells you something about the world it takes place in—it also subtly tells you something about the narrator.

That narrator is not only an observer of human behavior, but a strongly analytical one. The narrator, the reader soon learns, is an actor. The opening line prepares you for that right from the start, without telling you so, by demonstrating how an actor observes people and understands how their backgrounds inform their actions and, in this case, their attire.

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I slipped the poison dart into its slot under the right collar of my cloak, next to the lockpick.

Jhereg by Steven Brust. This may or may not be cheating, since there is a prologue prior to this line, but it still works as an enticing opening sentence. Brust doesn’t drown you in information about the extremely complex fantasy world this takes place in.

Instead, if you don’t know who Vlad Taltos is (meaning you skipped the prologue), you are immediately questioning what kind of a man needs poison darts and lockpicks, and has designated places for them under his collar as a matter of course. And if those are under his collar, what else is he carrying? Vlad is a professional assassin, extremely competent, and also not a reliable narrator, something the poison dart suggests, at least a little.

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Her chance was one in seven, unless the ghost lay at none of his old lairs.

Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson⁶. I’m cheating again, perhaps, because the book begins with an epilogue (yes, it begins with an epilogue), but the epilogue only really makes sense when you get near the end of the book. Placing it up front is a stylistic choice I won’t go into here.

Here, again, we are presented a mystery of sorts. Her chance of what? What is the ghost? And the novel is hard science fiction, so it can’t actually be a ghost, it must be something else. Why is she looking for this ghost? Why is a ghost laying? Readers will go on at least a little further to figure out just what is going on here.

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The fifty empty freights danced and rolled and rattled on the rough road bed and filled Jericho Pass with thunder; the big engine was laboring and grunting at the grade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost.

Gunman’s Reckoning by Max Brand. Brand wrote popular westerns for a mass audience. I’ve only read a few (that’s a relative statement; Brand was prolific, to the tune of ten novels per year, some years; I’ve read somewhere around twenty or thirty), and my impression from that sample is that he wrote truly amazing opening chapters, and the remainder of his books are, sometimes, merely entertaining.

Gunman’s Reckoning’s opening chapters are a masterful piece of manipulation of the reader, beginning with setting the scene with this sentence. It doesn’t tell you anything about the book or what’s about to happen, it simply sets the stage for the opening scene in a very interesting way. Since it’s a western, making the landscape and the environment prominent is not only good, it’s almost required. And the detail of the setting is interesting, in that sound doesn’t work quite the way you might expect, which draws the reader into the scene as a conversation is about to ensue in the noise.

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Every single one of these authors is or was a commercially successful, popular name. Boutin would probably sneer that they aren’t whichever past greats he has decided to be important this week, but so what? They connected with their readers, and made a living off their writing. Even if your goal is to write a novel for the ages that will live forever, to achieve that, it must first connect with readers now.

To do that, studying popular writers is better than studying great literature from the past, because to understand why they connected with readers the way they did, you also have to make a survey of the popular literature of their time and culture, before you can even begin to guess at why they opened their books the ways that they did. So for now, we’ll stick with writers currently popular.

And what do we find in the opening lines?

None of them is pretentious. They’re not beating the reader over the head with how important they think they are. None require the author to tell the reader, “Don’t worry, the story begins in four chapters.”⁷

None of them, excepting perhaps the Max Brand line, assumes the reader is willing to keep reading without something interesting to draw them on. (And it’s not true of the Brand line, either. If you want to say Boutin’s opening is like Brand’s—it isn’t—my answer is that Boutin didn’t write a western.)

Virtually all of them pose some kind of a mystery for the reader, a situation that the reader wants to know how it got that way, or a contradiction that needs resolving, or simply a juxtaposition that requires more explanation.

None of them over-explain things that the reader has no reason to care about yet. Instead, they provoke interest.

And not one of them gives the reader an impression that the author did not intend.

How can we apply these ideas to Empress Theresa?

There are two things that happen in the first chapter that might draw the reader in: the fox,⁸ and Theresa’s interview with the government agent.

If you began with the fox, you could do a retrospective opening line, like this:

When I was ten years old, I saw a fox come out of the woods; seeing that fox changed the history of the world.

That makes Theresa sound important without irritating the reader with narcissistic self-regard. It’s far from great, but it does give the reader something to draw them on: how could seeing a fox change history? Especially a child seeing a fox?

In my opinion as an editor, it would be more interesting (assuming Boutin’s writing skills were up to the task) to open the book with Theresa being stalked by the woman who turns out to be a government agent, doing the interview in the first few hundred words, and letting the story of exactly what happened that lead up to this scene get filled in, detail by detail, as the chapter goes along. That would create some mild suspense, as the reader wonders why the government is so focused on the kid, and why the kid is so wary about everything.

Doing it this way would give a significantly stronger opening line, something that would definitely draw a reader in:

The first time a government agent tracked me down and interrogated me, I was ten years old; she wasn’t happy when she finally gave up and walked away.

That lets the reader know the government has a non-trivial interest in a child, makes him wonder why, and further makes him wonder why the agent would walk away unhappy.

And notice that there’s no narcissism. Theresa doesn’t assume that she’s important because she’s Theresa. She doesn’t prattle on about what people say about her. She doesn’t beat you over the head with how cute and smart and gosh-darned amazing she is, let alone with how cute and smart and gosh-darned amazing everybody else says she is. It gives a situation that causes questions in the reader’s mind, and makes him want to learn more.

Another way to go would be to oversell her importance, hard, though again without her petty need to be perceived as Very Important:

The first time someone tried to assassinate me, I was eighteen, and it was the President ordering the military to detonate a nuclear warhead on the remote controlled plane they had forced me aboard. I realize this requires a bit of explanation. How it happened was this way…

Norman Boutin wants to be “important.” He wants to be praised. He wants his ego stroked, and gets enraged any time someone fails to do it.

Don’t make his mistake. Don’t try to solve the problems of the world with your first sentence, and don’t go looking for praise.

Just make your reader want to keep reading your book.

And when people tell you something doesn’t work, instead of finding things about them you can use to attack, like their review histories or the books they’ve written that don’t meet your approval, or anything at all, try listening to them. It’s a novel concept, but it’s truly necessary if you ever want to be taken seriously as a writer.

[D. Jason Fleming is the lead structural editor for Raconteur Press’s line of novels, a freelance structural editor, an indie author, and a glutton for punishment, as evidenced by the fact that there is a partly-written draft in his novels directory that is not titled, “If you’re going to write about an overpowered teenage girl, at least do it *&#@$ing RIGHT!” but may as well be.]

1. I am not joking. You have no idea how much I wish that I were.

2. And, seriously, the ‘Zon yeeted comments on reviews not a heck of a long time after the 10k limit was reached. Was the 10k thread a contributing factor to that decision? I’d bet at least a small amount of money on it, though I have no definitive evidence.

3. Your editor gets name-checked as a participant in the Epic Thread of Epicness.

4. Your editor might have been the one to provide him with a copy.

5. In point of fact, Boutin has re-written and re-published the book at least once, possibly several times, without notice, and if you buy the book now, Theresa is not an only child. But only in the first chapter. So the first line is slightly different. But not better.

6. And my vote for Poul Anderson’s masterpiece, doubly so if you include the next book, The Stars Are Also Fire.

7. Yes, Norman Boutin actually did that.

8. In case you took my advice and did not go down any of the rabbit holes to learn about this book, in the first chapter of the book, ten-year-old Theresa sees a fox come out of the woods, and a white ball leaps from the fox into her belly. Yes, seriously. That entity gives her superpowers, which drives the rest of the “plot.”