The first sentence

UPDATE: I have used this exercise in a dozen classes now ranging from elementary school to high school and it really works well. Students find it fun. It helps them understand the concept of hooking readers into a story. It shows them how they need to have a thesis -- or point or story -- as well as a them or tone or voice. Try it out. -- geoff gevalt

One of the best writers I worked with as a journalist was Bill O'Connor, then a columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal. Bill wrote about everyday people with unique, funny perspectives and stories. Bills skills were these:

• He connected with his subjects and so drew from them great detail and open expression.
• He chose his details well and sparingly
• He used dialogue well
• And he had great first sentences.

"Writing is easy," he'd say. "You just write one sentence at a time, with the second sentence relating to the first, the third with the second, and so forth until you're done." He'd then smile and admit, "But getting that first sentence, that's the hard part."

To Bill, the first sentence set the direction of his story, of his writing exploration.

BULLET POINTS: A good first sentence, or paragraph, does any or all of the following:

1. Sets the tone of the story.
2. Sets the voice of the main character.
3. Sets the scene.
4. Introduces the main character.
5. Creates the conflict or a question the reader wants answered.

EXERCISE: Get your students to focus on first sentences in books or stories they have read. Print out the ones below. Choose your own. Have them talk about some of the opening sentences: Do they work? Why? Why not? Do they want to read on?

(OPTION: If they've done some recent reading and have their work with them, assign them into reader groups and have each of them read each other's opening sentences on recent stories or essays and offer suggestions. Do they work? Do the lines draw in the reader? Set the tone? Are they clear and strong)

SEVEN-MINUTE WRITE: After discussion, have students write an opening line to a story they have not yet conceived or written. Give them only UP TO seven minutes, but this can be done in four or five minutes. If some finish before that, have them write another. And another.

AUDIENCE: Then have each student read his or her best opening line; have every student read. Discuss what they notice about each other's lines. Do they want to continue their stories? Talk about what they might do with their stories...

CONTINUE THE STORIES. Have students write the next sentences that go with their opening lines in their journals or online blogs.

Tell them to have fun at it, but to make sure their stories make sense. (GG)

Famous First Lines -- Words to draw you in

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
--  George Orwell, 1984

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
— Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, 1915

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
—  Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

A screaming comes across the sky. 

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.    
—  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 1952

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'
--   Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.
—   Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. Its eyes were closed.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Harry Potter was a very unusual boy in many ways.
— J.K. Rowling,  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - "To Whom It May Concern" - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.
—  Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
—  Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

All this happened, more or less.
—  Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn’t change that. He sat across from me, wearing a loud plaid sports jacket.

— Laurell K. Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)