First Impressions, Scribbles Edition

I don't like beginnings. That is to say, I don't like writing them; I would rather write anything - even a death scene - than a beginning, whether it be of a whole novel or just of a chapter. I have quite a horror of them, perhaps from hearing the constant refrain, "Create a good hook! You must hook the reader! Create a good hook!" After a while it begins to eat into your soul, and when you open that blank document all you can do is stare as the word pounds over and over in your head, "Hooooooooook!"

However, I do like to admire the work of other writers in this area and pretend that they had as difficult a time producing theirs as I do with mine. Jenny did a post a few days ago on the first sentence of each of some of her favorite books, and although naturally she took some of mine, I wanted to follow her example. So without further ado, and in no particular order...

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."
jane austen, emma

"It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet."
james fenimore cooper, the last of the mohicans

"As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit."
c.s. lewis, perelandra

"The Jubel es Zubleh is a mountain fifty miles and more in length, and so narrow that its tracery on the map gives it a likeness to a caterpillar crawling from the south to the north."
lew wallace, ben-hur

"Hill House, though abandoned, had remained unscathed during the years of the Dragon's occupation."
anne elisabeth stengl, veiled rose

"Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans."
homer, the iliad

"It was a dark and stormy night."
madeleine l'engle, a wrinkle in time

"In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army."
arthur conan doyle, a study in scarlet

"There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always."
norton juster, the phantom tollbooth

"It is impossible to estimate the significance of the life of C. H. Spurgeon without knowing something of the religious condition of the land at the time when his ministry commenced in the middle of the last century."
iain murray, the forgotten spurgeon

"When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
william shakespeare, macbeth

"The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day - a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste."
jean webster, daddy-long-legs

Most of these are simply spectacular beginnings, each in its own way. The opening line of Emma sets the tone for a light, witty read that seems to indicate that the authoress had her tongue in her cheek the whole time she was writing it; The Phantom Tollbooth introduces you to poor Milo, who doesn't know how to spell 'February' and doesn't much care; A Study in Scarlet introduces you to good old John Watson and then gradually slides the reader into the shock of meeting Sherlock Holmes, who first enters the scene flailing a test tube and crying, "I FOUND IT!"

I'm not sure who doesn't love the first line of Daddy-Long-Legs and decide right away that it is the perfect book for a rainy day. And the person who doesn't know the chilling pronouncement of the First Witch in Macbeth obviously never acted the play out with stuffed animals as a child. And then there's The Iliad. One wonders if the person who first wrote down the poem realized how chillingly epic that first line is - wonders if he stopped, sat back, peered at the introduction and remarked, "Hey, that's pretty good!"

I can never decide whether Madeleine L'Engle's beginning for A Wrinkle in Time was frank or tongue-in-cheek, but it certainly is catchy. Veiled Rose begins with a prologue that is actually the almost-end of the book, introducing the reader to the Dragon, then moving back in time to the summer when everything began to happen at Hill House. Even The Forgotten Spurgeon, a biography, grabs the interested reader by the collar; what was the religious condition of Britain at that time?

Granted, at least two of these are not hooks. As much as I love The Last of the Mohicans, I did not remember that opening line and frankly I think I skipped it; and with Ben-Hur, a caterpillar mountain is not the most exciting way of introducing such an epic novel. But these are exceptions, and they work because the rest of the book is splendid and by the time readers are in the middle of the forest with Uncas, Hawkeye, and the rest or escaping a naval battle with Judah Ben-Hur, they don't really care what the first sentence of the book was. For the rest of us mere mortals, hooks are important and we have to muddle through as best we can. But who knows? Maybe some day people will go around quoting the first line of Wordcrafter like they do with Macbeth.

...Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.