THE POWER OF FIRST SENTENCES
Have you ever read a book and wondered; “what the hell was going on in the head of this writer when they wrote this particular first sentence?” I do it a lot....
First sentences set the pace. They do more than just start the book, they own it. Gives it direction, and asks it to move. I marvel at the beautiful things that writers can create with it.
You should imagine first sentences as a process; “that moment you turn on the ignition of a sport car, rev it up, hit the accelerator, switch the gear system from P to D, watch the needle of the speedometer dance shedibalala before the car finally lunges forward”. You should be able to recreate what I just described if you are a Fast & Furious addict, and you’ve binged on several car race movies.
Because of the several innate powers that first sentences carry, they can either make a book or mar its success. If you list out ten bestsellers or widely read books, their first sentences did a shit ton of work.
A good number of bestseller authors have claimed that the first sentences are the most difficult part to write in any body of literary work they put out.
The first sentences are basically the first three to five sentences in a book or article or anything that is written. Some writers have argued that “first sentences” should not be ascribed to just the first five sentences but the entirety of the first paragraph in a book.
Here are some key points to digest:
Your first sentence must be powerful
Your first sentence must be welcoming
Your first sentence must hold attention
Your first sentence must be memorable
For specificity sake, this post will focus only on first sentences in books. So, if you are a budding writer, aspiring author who is working on their debut, or if you are already in the literary community and you want to make sure your subsequent books are better, then this post is for you.
Be powerful?
Your first sentence must wield power. They should be strong enough to make your readers feel restless; give them that feeling of “daayuum, I must finish this book”. Your first sentence must be a page turner. It should evoke the right emotions you want in your readers, it should put them in the mood you want them to be when they started reading that particular book.
Powerful first sentences are usually devoid of adverbs and adjectives. If you think you need adverbs and adjectives to make your story move, then it’ll most likely move and end up inside a canal.
Powerful first sentences give you an insight into what you signed up for the moment you chose to read that particular book.
Check out these excerpts:
1. Freshwater – Akwaeke Emezi
“The first time our mother came for us, we screamed.
We were three and she was a snake, coiled up on the tile in the bathroom, waiting. But we had spent the last few years believing our body—thinking that our mother was someone different, a thin human with rouged cheekbones and large bottle-end glasses. And so we screamed. The demarcations are not that clear when you’re new. There was a time before we had a body, when it was still building itself cell by cell inside the thin woman, meticulously producing organs, making systems. We used to flit in and out to see how the fetus was doing, whistling through the water it floated in and harmonizing with the songs the thin woman sang, Catholic hymns from her family, their bodies stored as ashes in the walls of a cathedral in Kuala Lumpur. It amused us to distort the chanting rhythm of the music, to twist it around the fetus till it kicked in glee. Sometimes we left the thin woman’s body to float behind her and explore the house she kept, following her through the shell-blue walls, watching her as she pressed dough into rounds and chapatis bubbled under her hands.”
2. My sister, the serial killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite
“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood. Most people use bleach indiscriminately, assuming it is a catchall product, never taking the time to read the list of ingredients on the back, never taking the time to return to the recently wiped surface to take a closer look. Bleach will disinfect, but it’s not great for cleaning residue, so I use it only after I have first scrubbed the bathroom of all traces of life, and death.”
3. Every Day is For The Thief - Teju Cole
“I wake up late the morning I’m meant to go to the consulate. As I gather my documents just before setting out, I call the hospital to remind them I won’t be in until the afternoon. Then I enter the subway and make my way over to Second Avenue and, without much trouble, find the consulate. It occupies several floors of a skyscraper. A windowless room on the eighth floor serves as the section for consular services. Most of the people there on the Monday morning of my visit are Nigerians, almost all of them middle-aged. The men are bald, the women elaborately coiffed, and there are twice as many men as there are women. But there are also unexpected faces: a tall Italian-looking man, a girl of East Asian origin, other Africans. Each person takes a number from a red machine as they enter the dingy room. The carpet is dirty, of the indeterminate color shared by all carpets in public places. A wall-mounted television plays a news program through a haze of static. The news continues for a short while, then there is a broadcast of a football match between Enyimba and a Tunisian club. The people in the room fill out forms.”
Be welcoming?
Okay, this may look a little bit patronizing but do not feel like that. There are hundreds of books making it to publishing stage monthly, and what that means is readers have varieties of books to choose from every month. Hence, as an author, you have to make your first sentences welcoming for your readers.
I am not saying you should figuratively water down your writing so that your readers won’t feel oppressed. What I am saying is that your first sentences should be inviting to your readers, else, they drop your book and pick up the next available one.
Welcoming first sentences keep readers relaxed. They put you in such a pace that you’re comfortable with. They are usually less cluttered and simple to read.
Welcoming first sentences focuses heavily on meeting with the psyche of their target readers.
Check out these excerpts of first sentences that best give a welcoming feeling from books.
1. Born on a Tuesday – Elnathan John
“The boys who sleep under the kuka tree in Bayan Layi like to boast about the people they have killed. I never join in because I have never killed a man. Banda has, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. He just smokes wee-wee while they talk over each other’s heads. Gobedanisa’s voice is always the loudest. He likes to remind everyone of the day he strangled a man. I never interrupt his story even though I was there with him and saw what happened. Gobedanisa and I had gone into a lambu to steal sweet potatoes but the farmer had surprised us while we were there. As he chased us, swearing to kill us if he caught us, he fell into a bush trap for antelopes. Gobedanisa did not touch him. We just stood by and watched as he struggled and struggled and then stopped struggling.”
2. The girl with the louding voice – Abi Daré
“This morning, Papa call me inside the parlor.
He was sitting inside the sofa with no cushion and looking me. Papa have this way of looking me one kind. As if he wants to be flogging me for no reason, as if I am carrying shit inside my cheeks and when I open mouth to talk, the whole place be smelling of it.
“Sah?” I say, kneeling down and putting my hand in my back. “You call me?”
“Come close,” Papa say.
I know he want to tell me something bad. I can see it inside his eyes; his eyesballs have the dull of a brown stone that been sitting inside hot sun for too long. He have the same eyes when he was telling me, three years ago, that I must stop my educations. That time, I was the most old of all in my class and all the childrens was always calling me “Aunty.” I tell you true, the day I stop school and the day my mama was dead is the worst day of my life.”
3. Vagabonds – Eloghosa Osunde
“Not one person, living or dead, has ever seen Èkó’s face. Neither has any single person heard Èkó’s voice, because Èkó does not talk to people. (Which masquerade do you know that does?)
So, in the beginning, there was Èkó. Èkó looked around its own sprawling body—where concrete meets lagoons and beaches and bridges and great great noise—and saw that it was good.”
Attention grabbing?
Yes, this is applicable not only to copywriting or article writing, it literally first started in books. Your first sentences must hold attention. It must be that strong enough to compel your readers to continue reading. Half of the time when people drop a book after reading a page or less, it is because their attention is not settled on that book. It is not necessary that your first sentence be chaotic, excessively dramatic, or outright clickbait-like. It should carry calm in turbulent ways.
Attention grabbing first sentences are fast paced and they give readers a jagged feeling. They very much make you feel like what a rat feels when a cat stealthily snuck up on it.
Attention grabbing first sentences usually make readers ask questions, feel surprised, intrigued, or scared.
Check out these excerpts below:
1. Nearly All The Men In Lagos Are Mad – Damilare Kuku
“One night, you will calmly put a knife to your husband’s penis and promise to cut it off. It will scare him so much that the next day, he will call his family members for a meeting in the house. He will not call your family members, but you will not care. You won’t need them. Your husband’s family will crowd the new apartment—a bedroom and a parlour, called self-contain by Lagos agents—you got three months ago. It will feel like they surround you. They will exclaim, sigh, frown, click their tongues, gnash their teeth, and repeat a million times that you committed an abomination.”
2. The Death of Vivek Oji – Akwaeke Emezi
One
“They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.”
Two
“If this story was a stack of photographs—the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country—it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother; it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.”
3. The Madhouse – TJ Benson
“When they were young and still shared dreams, the younger brother woke up from a nightmare and whispered to the elder, ‘I saw the future.’ Now the elder wonders if this is what the younger brother saw: three men struggling to follow a dead woman’s vanilla-cake recipe in a small kitchen; three men gravely looking at the big glass bowl of batter as if it holds her body in the dead silence of a Kaduna afternoon.”
Memorable?
This is what I enjoy most about books – the memories. The recollection of how the book made us feel, what our mood was when reading that book, the characters that we cannot seem to forget despite knowing fully well that they are not real. The scenes that lives rent free in our head, and the phrases we cannot bring ourselves to forget from the book.
Your first sentences must carry memories. It must be something that your readers will not forget the exact moment they turn to the next page. Think of books that you still clearly remember their first sentences, and ask yourself why you haven’t forgotten that particular phrase or character.
Memorable first sentences carry the right emotions, they keep it lingering, and they set the tone for subsequent parts of the book
Memorable first sentences are devoid of clichés, do not follow popular expectations by being different, and bold.
Check out these excerpts:
1. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives – Lola Shoneyin
“WHEN BABA SEGI AWOKE with a bellyache for the sixth day in a row, he knew it was time to do something drastic about his fourth wife’s childlessness. He was sure the pain wasn’t caused by hunger or trapped gas; it was from the buildup of months and months of worry. A grunt escaped from the woman lying next to him. He glanced sideways and saw that his leg had stapled Iya Tope, his second wife, to the bed. He observed the jerky rise and fall of her bosom but he didn’t move to ease her discomfort. His thoughts returned to Bolanle and his stomach tightened again. Then and there, he decided to pay Teacher a visit. He would get there at sunrise so Teacher would know it was no ordinary stopover.”
2. Stay with Me – Ayobami Adebayo
“I must leave this city today and come to you. My bags are packed and the empty rooms remind me that I should have left a week ago. Musa, my driver, has slept at the security guard’s post every night since last Friday, waiting for me to wake him up at dawn so we can set out on time. But my bags still sit in the living room, gathering dust.”
3. Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien
“IN A SINGLE YEAR, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. That year, 1989, my mother flew to Hong Kong and laid my father to rest in a cemetery near the Chinese border. Afterwards, distraught, she rushed home to Vancouver where I had been alone. I was ten years old.”
In summary, first sentences should be powerful, welcoming, attention grabbing, and memorable. It is okay if you do not get the perfect first sentences in your initial draft. Most editors play a good influence in helping writers craft their perfect first sentences. So, don’t stop writing because your first sentence is not moving, yet.
Comment with the first sentences of a piece that you are working on at the moment, let’s see an example from you.
Don’t fret; it doesn’t have to be the most perfect at the moment. Drop it as a comment so that we can review it together. If you have a a contrary opinion, drop it as a comment.
"She kept walking straight, she neither looked left nor right, her pace had slowed down by this time as she had been walking over forty kilometers without stopping. She didn't feel sorry for herself, nor did she admit to feeling the pains in her feet, she knew all of these were part of her restitution, or so she was told."
Thank you Ololade🙌, I'm a big fan though 😌