It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb. There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years. And it was so exquisitely far from the rest of my life.
from Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
Talk about a great hook: Sunshine, the eponymous protagonist and first-person narrator of McKinley’s first book for [...]
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
It’s an opening that’s been quoted many times, and with good reason. This opening sets a tone for the narrator, goes directly to theme and introduces the plot that’s about [...]
When you’ve been involved in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long it’s been absent from the news, you’re fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. [...]
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been [...]
When the summons arrived from Anna the Matriarch, Lisel did not wish to obey. the twilit winter had already come, and the great snows were down, spreading their aprons of shining ice, turning the trees to crystal candelabra. Lisel wanted to stay in the city, skating fur-clad on the frozen river beneath the torches, dancing [...]
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus forty feet long or so, waddling like an [...]
“We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness.”
From the short story “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek
The opening paragraph consists of a litany of places where the protagonist and his girlfriend didn’t make love. It’s a masterful use of narrative voice. The list establishes the inevitable arc of the story as well as the story’s [...]