Can You Match the Opening Line to the Classic Novel?

Speaking with The Atlantic in 2013, Stephen King pondered the importance of a book’s first words. “I think that’s why my books tend to begin as first sentences—I’ll write that opening sentence first, and when I get it right, I’ll start to think I really have something,” he said. “When I’m starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I’ll try to write a paragraph. An opening paragraph. And over a period of weeks and months and even years, I’ll word and reword it until I’m happy with what I’ve got. If I can get that first paragraph right, I’ll know I can do the book.” A good opener, King believes, “is a promise of the book that’s going to come.”

Indeed, an opening sentence or paragraph can pull a reader by the wrist into an immersive experience. See if you can match these introductory lines to the classic novel they belong to:

One of the most memorable first sentences for King belongs to The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, a potboiler about a drifter who gets involved with the wrong woman. It begins: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The line portends a protagonist who doesn’t appear to think too far ahead and takes opportunities as they come.

Conversely, a poor first sentence can sink a book’s chances with a reader. Just ask Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author who penned the now-legendary “It was a dark and a stormy night” to kick off his 1830 novel Paul Clifford—a line so foul it was already a hoary cliché by the time Bulwer-Lytton got hold of it.

If you think you can do better—and by that, we mean worse—you can always enter The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which invites participants to submit their own terrible opener.

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