PAPA GUNNER’S STORY TIME

Become a Big Brain Writer By Crafting Killer First Lines

Dangle your wormy words to hook the reader

I have a small penis.

The size of my penis isn’t relevant to the rest of this piece, but it got your eyes to this word. And this one. Hopefully, it’ll carry you all the way to the end.

That’s the power of a first line.

A vacuum cleaner sucking in the pop-tart crumbs of your attention.

As writers, we are bombarded by the idea that every line needs to be quotable. We’ve always understood that, no matter the sentence, it should look good as a tattoo.

That’s not true.

Only the first line needs to be good.

A good first line is like a catapult, propelling the reader a good distance. Gotta calibrate it just right or else you’ll miss the mark. Too poor an opening and they’ll fall short of the end. Too good, and you’ll launch them right past the end of your book into god knows where. Another book?

It’s hard enough to get one published, who’s got time for two? Not the publisher I sent my manuscript to; who responded by telling me not to quit my day job long after I already did, whereupon I lived off my savings to write the goddamn thing.

Anyway.

Let’s examine a perfectly measured opening. Here are the first couple lines from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Those two lines alone got me from the first page to the last one. Don’t remember a goddamn thing that happened in between the two. At some point early on, people shovel cocaine into a giant nose. It doesn’t matter though, my eyes passed over every word and I’m sure the memory of the book is sitting in my noggin.

We could spend all day talking about what one should do. I’m of the school that the best way to teach writing, is to teach what not to do. Take this short story I received in the mail. The pseudonym the writer used was intriguing enough that I gave it a read. Here’s Explanation of Benefits**This Is Not a Bill**, by Driebler Dental Insurance.

140 — Limit Eval | $102 220–1st PA Xray | $43 2740 — Crown | $1,367 3320 — Root Canal | $1,122 Amount Due to Provider…

It goes on like that. I can appreciate an experimental style, but there’s nothing for the reader to grab onto there. It’s the sort of thing an established author can get away with, not so much an amateur unknown.

This next story was sent by another writer with an interesting pseudonym. Here’s Untitled Envelope, by Grinshaw Recovery Services.

Dear Mr. Barrett,

This is an attempt to collect a debt.

While there’s some merit in it, they’re limiting the audience by addressing it specifically to me. I suppose this “Mr. Barrett” could’ve been someone else, but I’m not sure. I didn’t read any further.

For our final example of a bad opening, here’s a story I found taped to my front door. Notice to Pay Rent or Vacate, by Uptown Property Management.

Notice To: Gunner Barrett, TENANT in possession and all others: Take Notice That: zzzzzzzz

I added all the Zs in. I almost fell asleep reading that. Dreadfully formal, once again sycophantic in making me a character. Whatever happened to proper story form? What’s with all this post-modern tomfoolery? Meta-fiction is fine in small doses but who wants to dive in that crap all the time?

Moving on.

Sometimes imparting a sense of urgency on your reader is an effective way to begin a story. Look at the following first line from the novel VALIS, by Philip K. Dick.

Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals.

You got a memorable name, a mental health crisis, a friend calling and asking for drugs. It established immediate action. There’s a lot going on there, and boy howdy — don’t you want to continue?

I want to leave you with a wonderful piece of amateur writing, placed in a prominent local business person’s mailbox. This one was written by yours truly.

I have your husband. You will get him back in one of two ways: whole, or piece by piece. Bring $10,000 to Big Cherry Bar on 77th & Grumper by sunset tomorrow, or you’ll find yourself in the same boat as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

Stakes are set, consequences explained, even a clever little reference to a well known nursery rhyme. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but this one is very good. I had the husband proofread it and he agreed that it was good. I hope it’s well received by my target audience.

If this doesn’t generate some earnest engagement then by god — I don’t know what I’m gonna do.

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