The first line

This week at our Havant Writers'Circle meeting I set the members the task of doing some instant writing, all starting from the same sentence.  The sentence I gave them was: 'The statistics speak for themselves'.

After some initial grumbling about the sentence the members settled down to write their own stories from that opening line.  And what a varied bunch of stories they were.  The sentence was pressed into service to comment on the school system, make points about envorinmental and conservation issues, to talk about overpopulation.  And it became the vehicle for the production of two different comedic pieces.

The stories the writers produced weren't in the least constrained by the first sentence, which was the point of the evening.  I'd deliberately chosen a bland opening sentence which gave no clues to genre.  It was open enough to permit the writers to take the narrative in whatever direction they wanted.  And not only in prose.  We have a brilliant poet who created a heart-rending piece about the near-extinction of doves.

This general quality of the first line is the complete opposite of what writers do when creating a story for sale.  Part of my short story research last year involved reading the starts of dozens of SF short stories to try and figure out why mine weren't selling.

I discovered a common pattern to many of them.  They had a killer, attention-grabbing first line.  But then very often the story went straight into flashback, or began a solid info-dump.  All those things  we're told never to do in short story?  They were there in spades in the published ones.  Hmm.

I've read posts by agents who say that they can tell from the first line of a novel submission whether it's a book they want to represent.  And then there's the dreaded elevator pitch, which generally these days has shrunk to a one sentence pitch of your book.

This is bordering on the ridiculous.  There is no way one can completely summarise even the main plot line in one sentence.  I've even read a blog post by an agent recently where she admitted that task was impossible.

But still agents demand them.  I keep a computer file of pitches, and keep on editing and adding to them every time I use them.  In my short stories I've sharpened-up the first lines of many of them to grab in the way the published ones do.  

Now I really need to raise the energy to submit them again.


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