WHAT WOULD YOU PAY FOR THE PERFECT FIRST LINE?

Would you pay months or even years?

Stephen King pays that much ... every time.

He says, "The best first line I ever wrote is the opening of 'Needful Things.' Printed by itself on a page in 20-point type:

 "You've been here before." 

All there by itself on one page, inviting the reader to keep reading. It suggests a familiar story."

He further says in his interview with THE ATLANTIC:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/why-stephen-king-spends-months-and-even-years-writing-opening-sentences/278043/

"When I'm starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I'll try to write a paragraph. An opening paragraph.

And over a period of weeks and months and even years, I'll word and reword it until I'm happy with what I've got. If I can get that first paragraph right, I'll know I can do the book.

Because of this, I think, my first sentences stick with me. They were a doorway I went through.

The opening line of 11/22/63 is "I've never been what you'd call a crying man."

The opening line of Salem's Lot is "Everybody thought the man and the boy were father and son."

 See? I remember them!

The opening line of It is
"The terror that would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain."

That's one that I worked over and over and over.

I can tell you right now that the best first line I ever wrote -- and I learned it from Cain, and learned it from Fairbairn -- is the opening of Needful Things.

It's the story about this guy who comes to town, and uses grudges and sleeping animosities among the townspeople to whip everyone up into a frenzy of neighbor against neighbor.

And so the story starts off with an opening line, printed by itself on a page in 20-point type:

You've been here before.

All there by itself on one page, inviting the reader to keep reading. It suggests a familiar story; at the same time, the unusual presentation brings us outside the realm of the ordinary.

And this, in a way, is a promise of the book that's going to come. The story of neighbor against neighbor is the oldest story in the world, and yet this telling is (I hope) strange and somehow different.

Sometimes it's important to find that kind of line: one that encapsulates what's going to happen later without being a big thematic statement.

Still, I don't have a lot of books where that opening line is poetry or beautiful. Sometimes it's perfectly workman-like.

You try to find something that's going to offer that crucial way in, any way in, whatever it is as long as it works. This approach is closer to what worked for in my new book, Doctor Sleep.

All I remember is wanting to leapfrog from the timeframe of The Shining into the present by talking about presidents, without using their names.

The peanut farmer president, the actor president, the president who played the saxophone, and so on. The sentence is:

On the second day of December, in a year when a Georgia peanut farmer was doing business in the White House, one of Colorado's great resort hotels burned to the ground.

 It's supposed to do three things. It sets you in time. It sets you in place. And it recalls the ending of the book -- though I don't know it will do much good for people who only saw the movie, because the hotel doesn't burn in the movie.

Listen, you can't live on love, and you can't create a writing career based on first lines.

A book won't stand or fall on the very first line of prose --

the story has got to be there, and that's the real work.

And yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it's the first thing that acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist you for the long haul.

So there's incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want to know about this. And someone begins to listen."

What was the favorite first line you ever read?

What is ther favorite first line you ever wrote?

Mine is from FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE:

"It rained lies and death today."