Gripping First Lines, by Ben Jeapes

Photo by cottonbro studio.  (Gripping line, get it?)

We are (again) working our way through streamed episodes of Frasier, which remains one of the best sitcoms ever written – always fresh, never mean or smutty, and doing an amazingly good job at not becoming dated despite being over 30 years old.

And we just watched the first series episode in which Frasier and his brother Niles, who both love each other dearly but will drop into pointless one-upmanship at the drop of a hat, decide to write a book together on the psychiatry of sibling relationships. (Follow the link to watch the first part on YouTube.) They rent a hotel suite, lock themselves away … And by the time the sun comes up the next day, they have worked up a $232 bill in the minibar and are still arguing over the first line.

Pity my poor wife, whose husband was all but screaming at the screen: “JUST WRITE THE BLASTED THING!” A subject I have touched on before. Text is fluid; text on a computer screen even more so. It can be rewritten. It can be polished. It does not have to be perfect straight out of the author’s mouth; nor is it ever likely to be; and nor should it be.

Frasier was not wrong about the need for a gripping opening line; he was just wrong about the stage of the process in which it is written. Which got me thinking of Biblical opening lines.

Matthew (“This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham”) and Mark (“The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God”) both go for the strictly journalistic. Say what you’re going to say; say it; say what you’ve said. Luke (“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us”) and most especially John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”) both display a novelist’s instincts; their first lines draw you in and make you want to keep on finding out more.

Put them together and you quickly see there is no one, right way to start a piece of writing. If it fulfils the purpose you have in mind in writing the thing in the first place, then it works.

Ben Jeapes took up writing in the mistaken belief that it would be easier than a real job (it isn’t). Hence, as well as being the author of eight novels and co-author of many more, he has also been a journal editor, book publisher, and technical writer. His most recent title is a children’s biography of Ada Lovelace. www.benjeapes.com