Eloisa James on the importance of first lines

Back in 1999, when I first heard that a manuscript of mine was going to be published, my main response was kind of a dazed wonder. I was absolutely dying to know what the editor liked about it. My scintillating prose? My devastating dialogue? The fact that my hero and heroine cleverly make love in the Very First Chapter? I really hoped that reckless copulation wasn’t the reason. I’ve never forgotten my editor’s answer.

‘Oh, the first line,’ she said.

I tried desperately to remember the first line and couldn’t.I went back and read that first line, written the moment I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and decided to write a romance.  It wasn’t full of sagacious wisdom, ala Charles Dickens (‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness’).  It didn’t give you an instant taste of the main character’s voice, ala Janet Evanovich (‘There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever.  Joseph Morelli did this to me – not forever, but periodically’).

But what it did was throw the reader straight into a story.  So here’s the first line of that novel, Potent Pleasures:

‘Charlotte was one week short of seventeen when her life changed, falling into two halves like a shiny child’s ball: before, and after.’

Ever since then, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time crafting first lines.  These days I’m rewriting fairy tales, which gives me a particular challenge:  how can I give the first line the flavor of a fairy story?  Here’s the beginning of A Kiss at Midnight (my version of Cinderella):  ‘This story begins with a carriage that was never a pumpkin, though it fled at midnight; a godmother who lost track of her charge, though she had no magic wand; and several so-called rats who secretly would have enjoyed wearing livery.’

Here’s another example from Winning the Wallflower, my new novella for Piatkus Entice: 

‘It’s like a fairy tale! One moment Lucy is a younger daughter with virtually no dowry, and the next she’s an heiresses,’ exclaimed Mrs. Martha Brindle, sitting down beside her sister.’

Let me leave you with this question:  what’s the first line that stuck in YOUR mind as an early reader?  Here’s one of my favorites, one I wish I’d written:

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’

Winning the Wallflower by Eloisa James is available from Piatkus Entice now.