date created:: 2024-12-07 14:55
date modified:: 2024-12-09 17:25
Status:: 🌱seedling

3.4 The first line of a book should make you want to know more

The first line of a book, especially a novel, is one of the major opportunities to hook a reader's interest. Other hook opportunities are the title, the cover and the blurb.

In order to hook a reader's attention, that first line needs to do something to make them invested in reading more. It must spark their interest in someway, preferably by leaving them with questions that can only be answered by reading on. Whether those questions are about the world setting, a character or something else doesn't matter.

The rest of the first page also plays a role in hooking a reader into the story, but the first line is crucial to get a reader to read the rest of the first page.

See Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. for the first line in God's War

See It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife for the first line of Pride and Prejudice

See There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. the opening line to Voyage of the Dawn Treader

See In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. for the first line of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe