It’s a while ago that I looked at opening sentences, but since then I’ve paid a lot of attention to the first lines of novels. The problem is that all this concentration on “what works” doesn’t seem to have made me any better at writing my own. As part of my novel rewrite, I decided I hated the original opening line, one I came up with almost a year ago.
The thing is, I think that the topic of the opening chapter works for my story, and the right characters are …