Opinion Piece, 9/2/16: Opening Lines in YA (Part 2)
Here’s Part 1, if you haven’t read it already.
Context/Backstory
Tommy was a talker and didn’t much like the other ghosts, so he was forever talking to Kelpie. That’s how she divided them up: talkers and silent ones. Most ghosts were silent. Most ignored the living. Kelpie thought that was just as well.
- Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier
This one is pretty self-explanatory - open your novel with information that’s necessary to understand the story that follows. I feel like this is the most obvious way to open your novel, and if you’re not careful, it can end up being nothing more than a bland infodump.
Addie and I were born into the same body, our souls’ ghostly fingers entwined before we gasped our very first breath. Our earliest years together were also our happiest. Then came the worries - the tightness around our parents’ mouths, the frowns lining our kindergarten teacher’s forehead, the question everyone whispered when they thought we couldn’t hear.
- What’s Left of Me, Kat Zhang
This tries to be interesting, but I’m afraid it turns out kind of bland. This book actually has a really interesting premise, but the turns of phrase here are so cliched that it’s difficult to see its potential. It doesn’t do much to establish any sort of tone, and it’s not nearly as interesting as it could be.
When these opening lines work, it’s usually for one of three reasons: it either highlights an interesting detail of the story, it sets a mood, or it establishes a character’s voice. This one is a good example of an interesting detail:
There is one mirror in my house. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair.
- Divergent, Veronica Roth
This is kind of a misleading opening line, because the setting that it’s describing doesn’t really have much impact on the novel as a whole. But taken on its own, it works really well. This is an odd detail, and it suggests some very interesting worldbuilding. Contrast it to this:
When Egypt was young, and the first pyramids were being built with the sweat and blood of slavery, there lived a small civilization on the outskirts of society, led by a coven of thirteen men and women called the Dasi.
- Snakecharm, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
This also describes an aspect of the worldbuilding, but it’s a lot more cliched and less interesting than the one in Divergent. Which is a shame, because the worldbuilding in this novel is actually very inventive, and there were surely a lot of interesting details that Atwater-Rhodes could’ve opened with. But she clearly saw the opening lines only as an opportunity to get across information, whereas Roth cared about making that information interesting.
Of course, your focus doesn’t have to be on the information itself. Here’s an opening line that sets the mood:
Aisling’s mother died at midsummer. She had fallen sick so suddenly that some of the villagers wondered if the fairies had come and taken her, for she was still young and beautiful. She was buried three days later beneath the hawthorn tree behind the house, just as twilight was darkening the sky.
- Ash, Malinda Lo
The information itself isn’t particularly interesting, but Lo’s prose is. Ash is a retelling of Cinderella, and it has a very fairy tale-esque mood. Lo does a good job of establishing that right off the bat, with her characteristically strong prose. There are lots of great sensory details that help with this. I couldn’t find a ton of examples that focus mostly on mood like this one does, which is a shame - it strikes me as a big missed opportunity.
The other type of opening line that doesn’t focus on the information itself is the type of opening line that establishes a character’s voice. The best example I can think of for this type of opening line is The Catcher in the Rye (1953), but that book opens with a three-page long paragraph that I don’t feel like reprinting here, so here’s a shorter example:
April Fool’s Day. Totally appropriate for the idiot who turned down a chance to go home to Earth because she thinks she should play hero. Fortunately, all my contribution to the hero-ing business involves is standing where I’m put, ready to be hauled about by the people whose job it is to save the planet, or the galaxy, or however much of the universe is supposedly at risk. And what I’ve really signed up for is more labrattery, to figure out what ‘touchstone’ means.
- Lab Rat One, Andrea K. Host
The information that this paragraph conveys doesn’t really matter - it’s essentially just a recap of the previous book in the series. What matters is the voice. Cassie - the main character - has a super-distinct voice, and if it’s not established right away, it’s going to throw the reader off. So Host goes out of her way to establish as many of the quirks of this novel’s prose as she can, right off the bat. I talked about this a little in Part 1, but backstory tends to be a very good way of establishing character voice, because there’s a lot of potential for a conversational tone. That conversational tone is perfect for establishing voice quirks, and it can make information interesting that otherwise might’ve been tedious.
Last but not least, I wanted to share my favorite opening line that provides context and backstory. And yes, I’m aware that this is a huge cliche among YA fans, but I can’t pretend I don’t love it.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
- The Fault In Our Stars, John Green
This is another one that establishes character voice, and in a subtle way, it sets up the mood as well. (Green doesn’t beat around the bush - he lets you know right away that this novel is gonna be pretty depressing.) Other than that, I’m not even sure if I can describe why I love this opening line so much, except that there’s something very resonant about the word choice, particularly in the way the sentence resolves itself at the end. It just works, in a way that’s hard to articulate.
Flashback
The night Sarah and Ben showed up out of the blue. You should’ve known or suspected something was wrong. The vibe was weird, but then it had been for a while, and Sarah was… Sarah. Up in your room eve, when she kissed you and you lost yourself in her. The moment it all came crashing down.
- She Loves You, She Loves You Not, Julie Anne Peters
I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on this category, because I only found about a dozen opening lines that fit the bill. This is essentially a more interesting way of providing context or backstory than simply stating what the audience needs to know. It uses what works about In Media Res (the immediacy of the scene), to accomplish what the context/backstory opening lines want to do. At least, in theory. In practice, the flashbacks often turn out to have more narrative summary than real action. Which can still be interesting - here’s one I liked a lot:
On the day of my mother’s funeral, we all wore white. My father said that dressing ourselves in the stiff, pale cloth would be a mitzvah. I ran the word over my tongue as I straightened a starched new shirt against my shoulders. I was twelve when she died, and Rebbe Davison had told us about mitzvot only a few days before - how every good deed we did for the other citizens of the ship would benefit us, too. He said that doing well in school was a mitzvah, but also other things. Like watching babies get born in the hatchery or paying tribute at funerals. When he said that, he looked across the classroom at me with a watery gleam in his eyes.
- Starglass, Phoebe North
This has just enough detail to feel immediate, but it also keeps the distance that you’d expect from a flashback in a first-person novel. The scene it describes is also pretty interesting, both because of the emotional aspects of what’s being described, and because of the details of Judaism, which is pretty unusual for a YA novel. But on the whole, there’s not a lot to say about novels that open with flashbacks, and this post is long enough as it is.
Reflection
My name is Elizabeth but no one’s ever called me that. My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like is plain, not much there to notice. Even my life so far has been plain. More Daisy than Elizabeth from the go.
- How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
I’ll admit: this was kind of my ‘miscellaneous’ category. All I mean by ‘refelction’ is that it opens with either the narrator - be it a character or the omnipotent voice of third person - reflecting on the story in some way, shape, or form. That’s a very broad category, and I ended up including a variety of styles too wide to generalize about easily.
I like to run at night. No one watches me. No one hears my sneakers slipping in the loose gravel at the side of the road. Gravity doesn’t exist. My muscles don’t hurt. I float, drift past churches, stores, and schools, past the locked houses and their flicker-blue windows. My mind is quiet and clear.
- Catalyst, Laurie Halse Anderson
This line, for example, almost counts as In Media Res, but the narrator isn’t describing a specific night of running, she’s reflecting on the experience of running in general. That’s a subtle distinction, but I think it reflects a big difference between reflective opening lines and In Media Res. The point of this line isn’t to put you into a specific scene, but into a specific mindset. You kind of feel how the narrator feels while she’s running, without many specific sensory details. That’s not necessarily better or worse than a specific scene - each of them have their uses. Here, I think it works really well, because the distance from the scene emphasizes the surreal, almost spiritual nature of running to this narrator.
But anyway, when I said that there was too wide a variety to generalize easily, what I meant was that there are a lot of lines like that one, and also a lot like this:
Gigi said my guardian angel must have been watching over me real good when I was born. Maybe so, but I wish the angel had watched over me less and seen to Mama more. I never liked hearing about how I came into this world anyway. It didn’t seem natural, a live baby coming out of a dead woman. Gigi said it was the greatest miracle ever to come down the pike.
- Dancing on the Edge, Han Nolan
This doesn’t resemble In Media Res at all - it’s clearly the narrator reflecting on an aspect of her life that will be significant later on in the story. There’s not much I could say that applies to both this and Catalyst. But I also like this opening line a lot. It mostly works because of how well it sets the tone for the book, in really subtle ways that you probably wouldn’t even notice. This is a somewhat weird and unsettling novel, and that’s established with a somewhat weird and unsettling detail. But it’s not at all ham-fisted; you’d never guess that Nolan actively set out to do that, unless you’ve already read the novel.
The universal factor among when these opening lines don’t work, though, is a lot easier to identify: whatever the character is reflecting on just isn’t that interesting.
The night is full of mystery. Even when the moon is brightest, secrets hide everywhere. Then the sun rises and its rays cast so many shadows that the day creates more illusion than all the veiled truth of the night.
- Demon in my View, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
The best way to describe this is cliched. I know I keep using Atwater-Rhodes for examples of bad opening lines, which is weird, because I’d actually call myself a fan of her writing. But she doesn’t really seem to have a knack for opening stories, and this is the worst example of all. This could be the opening line of any horror novel from the last 40 years - there’s nothing new here at all. The information is so cliched that it’s essentially meaningless.
The one other consistency I found among these lines is that single-sentence opening lines don’t tend to work very well here. For example:
I only go out at night.
- In the After, Demitri Lunetta
I think the point of that line was to fill me with questions. “How creepy,” I’m supposed to say. “Why does she only go out at night?” In reality, my eyes start to glaze over. That’s just not enough information to capture the attention of anyone who’s read more than a few books in their life. If a single-sentence opener is going to work, the information has to be genuinely weird.
The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. About anything.
- Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
Now this is an opening line that intruiged me when I first read it. The whole ‘amazing magic thing gets annoying once you’re used to it’ is cliched by this point, but the slang, combined with the circumstance, draws me in. The spelling of ‘yer’ is something I’ve never seen anywhere else, and the fact that this country-ish slang is combined with a talking dog (in a non-cheesy way) suggests - correctly, I might add - that the novel to follow will be unique.
And, finally, my favorite of these opening lines:
Ironically, since the attacks, the sunsets have been glorious. Outside our condo window, the sky flames like a bruised mango in vivid orange, red, and purple. The clouds ignite with sunset colors, and I’m almost scared those of us caught below will catch on fire too.
- Angelfall, Susan Ee
This is kind of a weird way of establishing tension, but it works surprisingly well. Ee uses a really unlikely symbol - the setting sun - as well as bright imagery, to illustrate what is implied to be a coming apocalypse. The ‘since the attacks’ is vague, but it’s just enough to suggest the context for these sunsets without getting bogged down in unnecessary details. And the mention of a condo suggests something about the setting that’s about to light on fire - again, it’s vague, but it’s remarkable that such a small detail is enough to give me the image of an entire town. It’s the perfect opening for an action novel.
There’s no formula to writing the perfect opening lines. Ultimately, different things work in different circumstances, and how your novel opens depends on what your novel is about. But I wanted to make these articles to give an idea of the tools that writers have at their disposal to create opening lines. Thinking about opening lines leads to discussions about how to grab a reader’s attention, and even how storytelling functions. Even if the opening lines of a novel won’t make or break a book, these discussions are worth having.
