Monday, March 4, 2013

First Sentences that Suck

Recently, I've been struggling to put down a first sentence. And I realized that this had something to do with the fact that none of them were any good. I'd write something like, "Morning light broke through the blinds and bathed the floor in stripes." And then I'd say to myself, "Well what the fuck am I even talking about?"

It bothered me to the point that I grabbed my Hemingway section from my library and looked at the first sentence of each book. My findings lead me to an exercise and a method for writing good first sentences that story can grow from organically and help alleviate "writer's block."


"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton." The Sun Also Rises

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." The Old Man and The Sea

"He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." For Whom the Bell Tolls

"We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs and branches at the edge of the salt-lick when we heard the truck coming." Green Hills of Africa

"They were living at le Grau du Roi then and the hotel was on a canal that ran from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea." Garden of Eden

I noticed a pattern. First of all, we know, while not explicitly or definitively, who we are talking about. There is the mention of a character or characters within the first sentence. Secondly, we learn either something about the characters themselves, or their setting. He packs his first sentence densely with a lot of data to be understood.

My initial sentence about morning light or whatever spent an entire sentence giving very little data; it is morning and there are blinds and a floor. Who gives a fuck? That could be any room at the first hours of the day.

So I devised an exercise: Write sentences that mimic Hemingway's technique giving information about both character and setting immediately. I wasn't worried about the second sentence because I was working on building first sentences that laid foundation for second sentences. That second sentences could grow organically from.

My examples:


"He was crouched behind the craggy outcropping of granite, the sun high above, and in the distance a hawk screeched."

"Stephen Jones had been at the battle when the allied forces surrendered.

"We had just finished folding the blanket and packed it back into the basket."

"I tapped the final nail into the coarse box of deal and set the hammer on the table that ran the length of my workshop."

"Brenda sat on the cold porcelain and, when she finished peeing, she retreived the stick from between her legs."

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