First Lines of the Morning

In Writing Life Stories, by Bill Roorbach, I'm studying how to make memories into memoirs, ideas into essays, and life into literature. That's the book's subtitle, by the way.

These were my first assignments:
1. Clear a writing space for yourself. (Still working on that one.)
2. Set aside an hour a day to read something challenging - something that's been on your list, but you know it'll take extra effort to get through. For me, that's something like a novel by James Joyce or a book of nature writing by Edward Abbey or a book of science writing like The Moral Animal.
3. Form a writing circle to meet a couple times a month. (Done.)
4. Set aside scheduled time to write daily. (Done, but will be even more intentional.)
and
5. Find 10-20 "first lines" that work.

I was going to skip that last one, but then I decided I'd better play this game full out - and let me just say, it fed my soul to search through my book shelves to find my favorite books and essays, and then to type up their first lines.

Some of them, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road made me cry just to type them up. McCarthy nails the theme of love between his two main characters in that very first line, and that fierce desire the father holds to do whatever it takes to see his son to safety in a dangerous post-apocalypic world.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
-The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Others, like Richard Selzer's "The Masked Marvel's Last Toe-Hold" and Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face surprised me to start with such simplicity. When you finish their stories, though, you understand that Selzer's giving you another day at work - which is not just another day at work, and Grealy's giving you the shock of what it is to survive face cancer and be subject to the standards of beauty our society holds.

Morning rounds.
-"The Masked Marvel's Last Toe-Hold," Richard Selzer

Ker-pow!
-Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy

And I got to re-visit Cannery Row and how that first line is pure poetry about the contradictions of the simple but complex life on Cannery Row. I remember stopping at the end of that first sentence the first time I read the story, and re-reading it for what it felt like.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
-Cannery Row, John Steinbeck

And here are the others, including the ones above. I'll let them all speak for themselves now:

lake level: 4206.00'
Mimi passed away this morning at 5:10 A.M., June 27, 1989.
-"Screech Owls," Terry Tempest Williams

By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation.
-The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.
-The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon

My desert-island, all time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order:
1. Alison Ashworth
2. Penny Hardwick
3. Jackie Allen
4. Charlie Nicholson
5. Sarah Kendrew
-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so... was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon."
-Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

When I teach a beginning class, it is good.
-Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
-The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Morning rounds.
-"The Masked Marvel's Last Toehold," Richard Selzer

Not dead, yet: We found him where he had tried to die in his car -- a huge old Mercedes pulled to the side of Reservoir Road, a washed-out dirt track encircling, what else, a reservoir.
-"The Dead Man," Justin Cronin

At daybreak Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky.
-The Red Pony, John Steinbeck

Ker-pow!
-Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
-Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, Anne Carson

Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
-The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan

The line gets drawn, and the line gets drawn again.
-"The Line Is White, and It Is Narrow," Beth Kephart

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.
-Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
-The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

That last one just kills me. McCullers nailed it there, too. What the two mutes mean to each other is just going to explode as that story unfolds.

If you've read this far, do you have a favorite book with an opening that nails it? Add to my list...