Writing for today’s smartphone-obsessed generation requires that you create more than an exciting plot. You stand against smart gadgets that have dwindled humanity’s attention span more than ever. Studies reveal that the average attention span of humans has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to a paltry eight seconds in 2013. Your challenge is to get your readers’ eight seconds with your opening line and convince them that they ought to give you more.
Get your book read from start to finish with these opening line ideas.
A burning, intriguing question
Refrain from questions that sound like they came from a home TV shopping network ad. They should be mind boggling or controversial. And if they do sound TV commercial-ey, you better come up with a good punch line.
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Isn’t it ironic?
Irony isn’t just any contradiction. It’s a contradiction that goes against the very purpose of what a person, thing, or situation is, e.g., an ambulance accidentally running over a pedestrian, then killing it. Irony can also be a statement that has an element of witty mockery.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.– Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The Instigator
Imagine an action-packed movie that kicks off with a gripping scene, something that sets the ball rolling.
The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed. – Stephen King, The Gunslinger
Figuratively speaking
Figures of speech present humans and circumstances in a whole new perspective. They help paint a more vivid picture in your readers’ minds.
Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
A bizarre character
Anything out of this world will almost always catch everyone’s attention. In this line from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, the lead character named Callie Stephanides is born intersex.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.– Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
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