Engaging the Reader With That Crucial Opening Paragraph.

I wrote this in 2010, fifteen years ago, at the request of a fellow writer who had asked me to read his unfinished novel which ‘wasn’t working.’

I told him I thought his book showed great promise, but many, indeed most, potential readers wouldn’t get to appreciate it as his opening chapter was so dull. Readers are choosy, they can make instant judgements, get them hooked early or they’ll give up and look elsewhere. 

A lot of water under the bridge since then, but back then he asked me to expand on that advice. Revisiting it now I could have added so many more examples of opening sections that leap off the page. 

I read a book the other day. Wow, a writer who reads! 

Yeah, I do that too. It’s not one of the books everyone has read, but I knew I wanted to read it all after the opening paragraph. That’s something I thought long and hard about when I first set out to write a novel of my own. The pitch is vital – get that right and all those browsers, prospective readers, turn into people who want to read your book. As with the opening. In a bookshop, it’s all most people look at. The back cover and the first few lines. They’re vital. As an example, here’s the opening paragraph of the book in question:

Warren Ellis – ‘Crooked Little Vein.’

‘I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge. Making a smug huffing sound, it threw itself from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the hole in the wall where it had spent the last three months planning new ways to screw me around. I’d tried nailing wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it and spat the wet pieces into my shoes. After that, I spiked bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it across the eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.’

Now, that’s an attention-getter!

It set me thinking about other notable openings to books. 

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ came to mind.

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.’

Just about everybody knows that first couplet.

As with 1984 and that unforgettable first line – ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ – these openings define the book.

I looked at some more, just a few chosen at random from books that left a lasting impression.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

‘Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small un-regarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.’

Lolita. Well, obviously!

‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.’

Trainspotting.

The first line of the novel is actually, ‘The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling,’ but the film version starts with this paragraph from much later in the book. Easy to see why; it’s a brilliant passage.

‘Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday night. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin.’

Iain Banks ‘The Crow Road.’

‘It was the day my Grandmother exploded.’ 

Now, that’s simply magnificent! I remember reading that line for the first time, then re-reading it and shaking my head in admiration. I still do.

Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Choke.’

‘If you’re going to read this, don’t bother. After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece.’ 

I’m a massive fan of Palahniuk, he rarely disappoints and this opening is a classic.

Pride and Prejudice.

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

I capture the Castle.

‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.’

American Psycho, one of my all-time favourite books, has a wonderful opening.

‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.’

Who else? There are so many, but time is a scarce resource today. What about the results of my deliberations? My first book won a prize, many years ago now, for being ‘best opening chapter by an unpublished author.’ That was all it was, back then, one chapter. It was enough to persuade me to finish the book, eventually, and gained me an agent. The agent is now working in PR, having soon realised achieving wealth by hitching his wagon to my star, and others like me, was never going to happen. I’d decided, practically on a whim, to write crime fiction. My previous life had brought me into contact with numerous unsavoury people so why not ‘write about what you know?’

Here’s my own offering, from my first novel.

‘Marcus was special. He’d always known it. Even at the age of six when he’d decided to kill his father. His privileged childhood should have produced a doctor, an academic, perhaps a diplomat. Instead, he killed people for fun.’

There. Light and frothy, as befits the nature of the book. Ahem!

By the time I wrote my second book, I’d fully realised the importance of a dramatic opening paragraph. I wrote this particular one on the train, on my way to London to see the aforesaid literary agent. We met in The Savoy, yes, I know, but he still had expectations of fortunes coming his way from my writing at that stage. Even though my debut novel, self published initially on Kindle, had sold in vast numbers I was still resisting having my life being taken over by agents, publishers, editors, all those people threatening to disturb my plans to go off travelling again. A hard won freedom that would be difficult to relinquish. Did I crave wealth –  no – did I want to be ‘famous’ – absolutely not, did I want to carry on steering my own ship, free of interference – well, yes, I did.

Even so, he was a pleasant young man and I was enjoying his company, so why not hear his pitch? 

 I passed him the sheet of paper containing all I’d written to date of my second book, the first five lines. Hastily scribbled on the train journey down to London. 

He read it, uttered two words – ‘FUCK ME!’ – in a stentorian bellow to the consternation of the well-heeled diners in the Savoy Grill, and I knew I was on the right track. Here’s that opening paragraph.

‘Eighteen men, twenty-two women, fifteen children, sixty-two dogs, thirty-nine cats and hundreds of other even lesser creatures; he’d killed them all and could remember every one. A few had been necessary, but most had been purely for enjoyment. The greatest pleasure had been his parents and his baby sister; in their final moments, he’d loved them most of all.’