The Best First Sentences From the Contest Entries
Along with some general thoughts based on skimming the contest stories
Of course, it’s a little do-or-die here for the writer. A really bad first line can convince me not to buy a book — because, god, I’ve got plenty of books already — and an unappealing style in the first moments is reason enough to scurry off.
Steven King in the Atlantic article, Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences
I have guests coming over for dinner tomorrow for the first time since late 2019 and my house is a mess so obviously, the best use of my time is to skim through as many of the MWC entries as possible and share all my favorite first sentences. Right?
I spent a happy afternoon once going through all the About Me Stories, and picking out my favorite first lines. You can read the results here. It was fascinating to see what people did with a common prompt.
The recently completed but not yet judged contest gave me another chance to look at how a large number of people wrote a story based on the same prompt. I decided to look at the beginning of as many entries as possible and share the best first sentences here. In the process, I gleaned information on how people responded to the four contest prompts as I’ll share below as well.
Please note, I am not at all suggesting these are the best stories, although I think many of them are fantastic. Often your first sentence is a setup for the rest of the opening and isn’t at all impressive as a stand-alone. But there is no denying the power of a great first line which is why I gathered these for our mutual pleasure and edification.
Re-entry
There were definitely common themes popping up again and again: dating, addiction, returning to the office after COVID, mental health, coming home. My own entry into this category, a story about returning to my homeland after years abroad, was echoed in story after story. Still, each offering had its own twist.
I used to envy divorced people.
Regina Rodríguez-Martin in I Didn’t Want To Be THIS Divorced.
“I wish you’d just married a Black girl instead.”
Glenn Rocess in When Leaving Racism Means Leaving One’s Family
He grabs my seven of diamonds, lays down a clean run, and I’m in trouble.
Melina Oliveira in The tiniest of things
I’ve spent the last six months a scuba diver, reentering the atmosphere slowly from the depths of bottomless mimosas.
I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to crawl out of my skin.
Abisha Pathy in Re-Entering My Melanated Skin
What the hell is reentry anyway?
Aimée Gramblin in What the Hell is Reentry Anyway?
I’m sitting on a crate in a big warehouse filled with bodies, and I can’t seem to process anyone’s face.
Devon Price in Those Blurry People
They don’t tell you about all the small ways that children can break you open until you have one.
Ike K. in Kimberly Hart: Lost and Found
I used to breathe into the faces of strangers.
B J Robertson in It’s not that I don’t like you. I just don’t want to die
I don’t really know what to do about my eyebrows.
Christina M. Ward in The Dating Pool: Chubby Grandma Edition
I knew three weeks ahead of time I was going to commit suicide.
William Spivey in Returning to the World After Attempting Suicide
When the pandemic started and you all went home with your toilet paper and locked your doors, I was already there.
Being the indestructible, cowardly male type, I rarely venture to see a doctor unless it’s absolutely necessary, like when I got out of breath standing on an escalator only to discover I had pneumonia.
Steve Wyatt in The Point Of No Return
I fell out of love with ballet sometime in between the time a professor called me the most disrespectful person she’d ever met and when I dislocated an elbow during a dress rehearsal.
Lu in Getting Back Together with Ballet
Prior to my fifth birthday, I had never seen an apple.
Judi Hanson in The Closing of an Airplane Door Killed an Entire Way of Life for Me
My father’s ghost is haunting an Animal Crossing village.
Christopher M. Jones in Inside the Memory Card
Space
I was surprised by the diversity of stories submitted under the category of space. My mind went immediately to outer space with this prompt. I submitted a sci-fi short story. Very few other people made this choice.
The most common repeated theme was women writing about feeling a lack of personal space, or thinking they needed to not take up space. No men that I noticed wrote about space in relation to their own bodies although some did write about workspaces or living spaces.
“The worst thing you can do is the thing you’ll want to do most,” the park ranger explains.
Courtney Christine in Never Run from a Bear
I’m living with ghosts today.
Mia Hayes in We are the In Betweens
A hairy creature spooned me in bed, nudging me from the center of my mattress to the corner, then slightly off the edge.
Florina Rodov in Rooming with a Rottweiler
There is a place that everyone visits at some stage in their life, but almost no one goes there of their own free will.
Dan Foster in What Life is Like in Limbo Land
The plumber tells me that Elon Musk plans to surround the planet with so many satellites that NASA won’t be able to launch any more rockets
Simon Pitt in Our Strange Ideas About Owning Space
For some, it’s while playing catch or fishing or watching Monday night football, but for me, the times when I connected with my father best was when we were locked inside a car like his ’65 Corvette together, side by side, facing the same direction, destination unknown.
Mark Radcliffe in A Father, a Son and 29 Cars
My father was the only one-legged dancer on the dance floor.
Naomi Melati Bishop in He Was Half a Man, I Felt Like Half a Woman
Ask any woman who has ever felt the smother of a man’s hands on her face.
Evergreen Eden in How the Tragic Suicide of My Beloved Brother Gave Me Permission…
Already, you assume things about me.
Drop a pin onto a map aiming for the upper quadrant of Michigan, making sure the tiny town of Bentley is precisely targeted, and you will have found rural farming countryside, specifically dairy country.
Donna Lynn in Chained to the Farm
Work
Many people wrote about work life balance, about loving or hating work, what is work, quitting work, work from home, or working for yourself. Work defines, distresses, delights, dominates, and occassionally destroys us. My own piece on work is my favorite of my submissions to the contest.
This was hardest category for me to find great first sentences in. Maybe work doesn’t naturally lend itself to the same flights of creativity as the other prompts. The biggest conclusion I can draw is we as a people as very conflicted about our relationship with work.
In hindsight, I can see the meeting was flawed from the start.
Lindsay Pyfer in It’s About Time
Back when everyone hunted and gathered for a living, no one worked for the money, or the weekend, because neither existed.
David Milgrim in Everybody’s Working For Each Other, Not The Weekend
When a man’s head has been blown off with a shotgun, you’d expect there to be more of a mess.
Dan Canon in Secondary Traumatic Stress (or: On the Dispersal of Brain Matter in a Kentucky Trailer)
“You would be the dead girl,” the director said
Denise Clemen in The Dead and the Naked
When the first week of your first proper job comes to a shaking, sweating crisis by Thursday afternoon, something has gone awry.
Jessica A in How’s Work? A Tragic Comedy In 3 Acts
When you work for the dead the burden of responsibility for a ‘job-well-done’ weighs heavy.
Grey Hen With A Pen in The Clairvoyant Funeral Celebrant
I’m forty-two years old, and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.
Michelle Elizabeth in I Envy My Spouse
As a kid, I saw grown-up jobs as a cluster of hideous monsters waiting to gobble me up.
Sarah Paris in I Never Wanted to Visit My Parents’ Work Prison
Death
Predictably the most common response to this prompt was to write about the death of someone close to you. Numerous writers also wrote about their own near death experiences, the death of a relationship, or the death of a dream.
This is the only prompt I didn’t submit a story for. Ironic given I run a publication called Growing Grief which is focused entirely on stories about coping with the death of a loved one. I fully expected to write a contest entry but somehow couldn’t do it this month. I appreciated those who did though.
There’s no good way to say, “Mom, can I throw your stuff away because you’re going to be dead soon?”
Bev Potter in Death And All Your Stuff
I wonder if they’ll believe us when we tell them how bad it got.
Sara Benincasa in These Were Our Years
On a Tuesday I shoved my face into the crook of my wife’s shoulder and cried.
Eric Zerkel in What My First Two Weeks With Cancer Taught Me About It, Me and Us
The first time I saw him he was buck naked.
Russ Josephs in Even in Death, My Friend Was Full of Surprises
A year before he died, my rapist emailed me saying he was suicidal
Devon Price in The Men I’ve Killed with My Boundaries
Damp, speckled brown clumps of feather and gristle were inches from my freckled face.
Charles McDonald in Death by starling
My husband stood in the room in his underwear, and my mother sprawled across the bed in hers.
Bebe Nicholson in Is It Wrong to Feel Relieved That My Mother is Dead?
My sister almost got kicked out of my aunt’s funeral.
Carlyn Beccia in Death Portraits: A Celebration of Life
I am five years old and my family makes me repeat what to say to the border officials in broken English until I have it fully memorized.
Itziri Gonzalez Barcenas in On Finding Freedom: A Former Undocumented Immigrant’s Story
When I found the clothing planted in the bottom drawer of my dorm room bureau, I knew instantly why it was there, who put it there, and what I needed to do.
Emily Willingham in The death and resurrection of awe
With the cursive swirl of my final initial inked in pen, I had killed her.
Alexandra Walker-Jones in Death of a Freelancer
The death of my wig-wearing days was December 31st, 2019, the day I chopped my hair off.
Christine Nbemeneh in Why I’ll Never Wear Wigs Again | How I Reclaimed My Time and Inner Beauty
I was nine years old when I died for the first time.
Tina Brescanu in I’ve died every night since I was a child
Grandpa flipped his car end over end on the way to my wedding.
Benjamin Sledge in A Thousand Different Micro Deaths and Resurrections
It’s funny how death dances beside us from our first breath until our last gasp.
Aimée Gramblin in Sifting Through Death’s Layers
I blame the perfume commercials of the 1980s.
Adeline Dimond in Bury Me in the Golden Light of a 1970s Photograph
What makes a great first sentence?
The best first line draws you in and starts the wheels turning in your brain. It poses questions, make you wonder and eager to know to more. Good first sentences challenge you to read the second sentence and all the ones that follow to join the writer on a journey.
Writers know this already of course. It’s why so many of us sit, fingers posed above the keyboard unmoving while we stare at the blank screen. We know we need to nail this but aren’t sure how.
Stephen King is right there with us.
I think that’s why my books tend to begin as first sentences — I’ll write that opening sentence first, and when I get it right I’ll start to think I really have something.
My contest entry for space started as a first-line, “The gun was there.” That’s all I had for two days. I knew I wanted to have a character wake up on a spaceship with a gun. I didn’t know yet why she was there or what she was going to do.
More often I write a story and then go back and choose my first line. Frequently the best opener is hiding a couple of paragraphs in and I find myself rearranging my already written words. Or the story has gone in a direction I didn’t see coming and I need to write an entirely new first sentence.
Either way, I draw inspiration from reading other writer’s first lines that drew me in and delighted me. When you are stuck staring at the blank page, consider reading a list of great first lines like the ones above to get your own creative juices flowing.
Only a few of us will be winners in the contest, but all of us can win by learning from each other how to write compelling stories that draw in the reader.
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