Opening lines—get them right … or else!
Or else your readers won’t want to keep reading. This means that your novel, memoir, story, or essay won’t get published or won’t reach many readers.
Yikes! That reads like the opening to a horror story for writers, doesn’t it?
But that’s too much pressure, at least in the initial drafting and creating stage. So, let’s relieve some of that pressure.
First, let’s examine an opening that shows up on “best opening” lists, almost without fail:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … ” and so on, in the opening to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
