One Minute to Read

Recently Paperback Writer blogged about how The Historian disappointed her in the very first line:

I just wanted it to be great. I wanted her to deserve that whomping contract and to give me the book equivalent of a bigass box of CrackerJack with a diamond ring prize inside so I could write up something about the book here. This is what I got:

The story that follows is one I never intended to commit to paper.

How did Kostova's first published line grab me? Well, I immediately slammed the cover shut and put it on the [To Be Read Maybe Before I'm Dead] shelf. The cats like to hang on that shelf and cough up hairballs...

This was followed, predictably, by a whole bunch of people chiming in on the comment trail about how a disappointing first line can ruin a book, never to be picked up again.

You hear this a lot - how a first line can make or break an entire book. Kostova was, apparently, supposed to give you an orgasm in one sentence to earn all that money.

Am I the only one who disagrees?

Sure, first lines are important to the writer who is trying to sell. But as a reader of fiction, let me speak sacrilege and say that I don't give a crap about first lines and can't remember a single one.

That's right - my name is Abby and I don't care about first lines.

I don't read while I am driving, or while I am running a marathon, or while I am working at my day job. I am not looking for easily-digested sound bites to be read in the least amount of time. When I read a book, I am sitting in a chair, and for the time being I have nowhere else to go. And if someone has taken a year or more of their time to write something that's ended up on my shelf, I figure I can give them fifteen minutes of my time to decide if I'm going to like it or not.

In fact, I'm going to go even further and suggest that if you only have time to read one line of a book, then perhaps you have not scheduled your reading time properly. Perhaps you need to take another look at your daily schedule and give yourself longer than three seconds of leisure. Relax!

Nothing to do with PBW specifically - and I'm not defending The Historian here, which I didn't like either. But with the one-line theory, no one sees the difference between the importance of the first line when trying to sell a book and when reading one. Agents and editors are reading your writing at work - during their busy day jobs. They're moving fast. Readers are reading it during their leisure time, when they (I suggest) have a little time to concentrate. Long enough to read a page, or five, or even ten.

Lots of books start slow. Eliot. All of Trollope's stuff. Those big Shakespearean monologues. Most of Dickens - even the oft-quoted Tale of Two Cities doesn't start with action. It's just a bunch of stuff about what the times were like. Give it a minute - it's spellbinding. I promise. And relax!