Going to school on Saturday

 

Saturdays are supposed to be a mini-vacation from work and responsibilities, but I went to school today. Specifically, I want to a webinar on the importance of first lines taught by Hank Phillippi Ryan and sponsored by the Grand Canyon Writers chapter of Sisters in Crime. If you haven’t read any of Hank’s books, you should immediately seek them out. They’re thrillers, and she’s really good, over and above the fact that she’s won several major awards in the mystery world. Her newest title is Her Perfect World.

Today she talked about what the first line of a book should tell the reader. I’ve always known, or thought, that the first line should hook a reader in, and that’s been m goal. But Hank says it must do much more, and she traced the scenario of an average customer considering a book in a bookstore. Our Jane Q. Pubic considers the cover—the first selling point—and then flips to the back cover to study the author’s bio and look at the photo. Believe it or not, readers want to know what the author looks like. But then, Jane Q. will open the book and read that first line—and right there, in a few seconds, she decides whether or not she’ll buy that book. Ideally, the first line will so grab her that ten minutes later she’ll still be standing there, reading the first page.

Hank says the first line must set the tone for the book—is it action adventure, spy thriller, sweet romance, cozy? It sets the book in time and indicates forward motion because the plot of a mystery always must be moving forward. We know from that first line that something has happened, something significant, and that the story will develop to tell us what that something was, how it affects the main characters. And the first line must introduce the main characters—that is, to use Hank’s phrase, “who we’ll be on the train with.”

She used several examples. One that sticks in my mind comes from Ken Follett (not being a Follett fan, I can’t tell you which one): “The last camel collapsed at noon.” So what do you know? The narrator is almost certainly in the desert, there have been several camels, but this is the last one, and it doesn’t just die—it collapses. It’s noon, and you can almost feel the desert heat. And undoubtedly the narrator is with a party, if there were several camels. So now they are in a bad place—the story has to go forward. How will they survive? What will they do?

The program sent me scurrying back to look at some of my own first lines, and I decided the best one I ever wrote came from The Perfect Coed: “Susan Hogan drove around Oak Grove, Texas, for two days before she realized there was a dead body in the trunk of her car.” What does that tell you? The narrator is not part of the story but a detached observer. Susan is in a small town in Texas. She’s not very careful about her car. This is a serious murder mystery, though with a light touch—it’s almost laughable that she wouldn’t know there’s a body in her car. And we as readers know we’re going to hear whose body it is and how it got there—and the story is on! I don’t know what Hank would say about that line, but I think it still needs improvement. Now I’m going to look at the first line of the forthcoming Irene in Danger.

Aside from the webinar, the highlight of the day was coffee on the patio with a new neighbor, a former teacher who founded a non-profit to help with the education of military children who are frequently transferred from school to school. Mary was CEO for twenty years, traveled extensively during those years, and has lots of stories to tell. It was a lovely morning, with a cool breeze, my friend Subie was with us, and we told our own stories about children and grandchildren and growing old.

A satisfying Saturday