Fiction writing

If you’ve ever attended a fiction writing class or listened to a famous author talk about their craft, you’ll quickly learn the importance of opening lines. A perfect opener, the theory goes, will set up scene, character, plot, and tone. If you can do all this in the first paragraph, great. But better still if you can do it all — or at least most of it — in your opening sentence. As Stephen King said, “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” This is the writer’s hook, the way to grab the reader and hold their attention. But not all opening lines are created equal. A Charles Dickens novel might have a first sentence that’s more than 100 words, while a classic of comparative stature might have just three: “Call me Ishmael.” yeremiah@aol.com Yeremiah Hardt