The first sentence.

We’ve all heard that we only have the first three chapters to capture an editor’s attention. While that’s all well and good for a novel, it’s not going to get you anywhere with a short story.

You’re going to have to catch the reader with the first line.

I feel that this applies to any work of fiction, but the short story or novella relies on this principle even more heavily than a full length novel. With a short piece, your reader expects to be immersed in the tale quickly, which stands to reason, since the story is going to end pretty quickly.

Honestly, I sit around just thinking up first lines for stories. My wife is a writer as well, and her notebooks are full of lines I’ve blurted out while watching T.V. or working on another writing assignment. She’s using at least three of them as a basis for stories of her own right now, and has kindly asked me to sop distracting her until she’s finished something.

Say you’ve decided to write a story about an outbreak of zombies in a small Georgia town. There are a lot of ways to open a tale like this, depending on the tone you’d like to set. Let’s assume that we’re going to go with something a bit campy, since the zombie genre is a bit flooded, and hey, what’s more fun than poking fun at zombies, they’re not exactly the brightest bulbs.

You could start off setting the scene, as most books on writing would suggest. Though this method usually takes a full paragraph, and your first line would very probably look like this:

Moonlight glinted eerily from the battered neon sign standing in front of the old Fill-N-Go station.

O.K. Not bad. It’s a good opening line. It sets the time of day (or evening, in this case), the location (outside the Fill-N-Go), and a mood. All good, but following the premise that we want to hook the reader from line one, it could be better. Let’s try getting a little action going right from the start, and set the scene for the rest of the story.

The old Fill-N-Go station would have been picture-postcard perfect standing there in the Georgia moonlight if it weren’t for all those half rotten dead guys shuffling around in front of it.

The second “first line” covers a lot more bases than the first. It sets a tone for speech patterns that are far more “Georgian” than the fist. We’ve established that it’s night, that we’re still at the same old filling station, and that there are a bunch of zombies wandering around the place. From here, we’ve got a lot of interesting possibilities.

Let’s look at another example. Let’s say we want to write something a bit more serious. Perhaps an urban fantasy that opens with the our hero (though he doesn’t know it yet) inviting the villain (and we do know that much going in) for dinner to warn him of something, or to get some information.

There are a lot of different ways you could start this off, but to get the concept it would take more than one sentence. The first line of the “standard” paragraph I’ve drafted goes like this:

Carlson sat at the table as though he owned it.

OK… It’s not a bad sentence, but without the context of the rest of a paragraph, it doesn’t tell you much, does it. We’ve got a name, but is Carlson the hero or the villain?

In my own work, I’d forgo the name and try to set a mood instead.

It’s unusual for the sheep to invite the wolf for dinner.

That line serves two purposes. It makes the reader pause and go “Hmmm”, and it imparts that the weaker of the two individuals has initiated the meeting. And that works for me.

I’ll spare you any more examples, I’m sure you’ve got the idea by now.

Have you looked over the first line of the story you’re writing? Does it make the reader want to dive in or does it simply open the paragraph? Only you can decide if this method works for you, but I think if you give it a shot, you’ll find that just the process of looking for that “perfect first line” will spark story ideas for you.

It does for me.

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