The First Line Game
My wife and I like to play the “first line” game in bookstores and libraries.
We have some favorite authors and genres, but we don’t know enough to always look for something specific. We just like looking. Exploring. So, when something catches our eye — the cover, the title, the recommendation — we pick it up and read the first line. One line, and we either say “oh sh*t, this could be good,” or we put it back.
That’s the game. I know it may sound reductive, like judging a book by its cover, and sometimes it ends up being the first paragraph or first page, but we talk about what we like or don’t. A first line is a first impression, and what it’s really telling you is how much care this writer — whoever they are, whatever their name — brought to the thing you’re holding. Most of the time, you can feel it in one sentence.
Here are a few first lines I love.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” — Stephen King, The Gunslinger
Wanted to start here because this one is all over blogs on the internet. My brother actually made me love it. He said that any writer with a first line this good could use it and conjure a thousand different stories — different genres, eras, worlds — and most of them would still be interesting, but he still doubts they’d be as creative and awesome as King’s story. But it was the conceit that got him: what could be.
If your book started with this line, would it be fantasy? Science fiction? A Western? Something else entirely? You don’t know when you read it. But you want to. Sometimes that’s what a great first line does. It doesn’t answer questions but sets a stage and conjures a thousand in the reader’s head of what comes next.
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
What had once been, and you already feel the dystopia before Atwood explains anything. Her prose is always beautiful and captivating, but this opening line takes something we all know and tells us about this new world we’re diving into.
This world has no time for games, sports, or fun. Whatever that gymnasium was for — whatever joy it held — it doesn’t hold it anymore. It’s darker now. Twisted. Now, it’s just about surviving. It’s world-building through implication, and I really love that.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
I’m Colombian on my mother’s side, and this book isn’t my history, but it represents it — the magical realism mixed with brutal and tender moments. All these people who weren’t my ancestors but whose lives paved the way for mine and so many others. And this first line does something I find remarkable: it puts a man at the end of his life, facing death, and his mind goes to a small, beautiful moment from childhood.
The halcyon days, the simplicity of ice carried in by wandering gypsies. Admittedly, it’s a long sentence, but García Márquez can often have sentences that run pages, and it’s kind of amazing that they still make perfect sense, even through translation. Plus, that opening image of the firing squad, he spends the entire novel paying it off. By the mid-point (and the end of the book), you understand exactly why that memory was chosen. That’s the remarkable promise a first line can make when the author knows exactly how their story ends.
“Call me Ishmael.” — Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I’ll be honest — I didn’t love Moby Dick the first time I read it. I thought I should, it was a classic beloved by so many people, so I pushed through. And somewhere in the pushing, I realized something: Melville wasn’t writing for me. He was writing for people who didn’t have radios or televisions, people who would pick up this enormous book and read it aloud to their families at night, take them on a grand adventure they’d never otherwise experience.
So the density, the slowness, the repetition, it was all designed. It was meant to recount scenes and descriptions to be re-immersive on purpose. And Ishmael — one of my favorite narrators ever. The opening line tells it, but he’s such a great voice and protagonist to follow. By the end, when every character and every motivation finally converge, it just hits right. You know all of them. You’ve been on the ship.
You’ve experienced it with them, because Melville takes his time to let you.
“In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.” — Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
This one works differently from the others. It’s a thesis, not a scene, which is actually another of my favorite first-line tropes — Emily Henry is phenomenal at this. But Hannah is telling you exactly what she’s going to prove before she proves it.
The opening of the novel is written in the present tense of an old woman looking back, and this line is her from the very first page, already having lived it. The story she tells is her evidence of the thesis. And, by the end, you’ve watched Hannah prove it twice over, through two different sisters, in two completely different ways.
The point of the first line game isn’t to judge a book in one sentence. It’s to find the writers who cared enough to make that sentence represent the story you’re about to lose yourself in. Because if they cared that much about the first line, they probably cared about everything that came after it.
So, next time you’re in a bookstore or the library, pick something up, read the first line, and see where it takes you.