The first sentence is a door

I spent four days on an opening line this week. Four days, one sentence, and the sentence I ended up with is eleven words long. Put like that it sounds like a confession. It is closer to a receipt.

The trouble with first sentences is that they are asked to do two jobs at once, and the jobs pull against each other. A first sentence has to be interesting enough that a stranger keeps reading. It also has to be honest about what kind of thing the reader has walked into. You can write an opening that crackles and then spend the next four pages apologising for the promise it made.

What I actually do

I write the bad one first, on purpose. Something flat and administrative: This is an essay about my grandmother's kitchen. Nobody will ever read it, but it holds the door open while I work out what is really in the room. Then I write twenty more underneath it, and most of them are worse, and somewhere around the fourteenth I write a phrase I did not plan and did not expect, and that one is usually the door.

A first line is not a hook. It is a threshold. The reader should be able to feel the temperature change as they step through it.

The four days were not spent staring. They were spent writing the rest of the piece, badly, and then coming back. You cannot find the entrance to a house you have not been inside yet. Every time I try to write the opening first, I produce something that gestures grandly at a building I have not built.

So the receipt reads: four days, one sentence, eleven words, and a piece that finally knows what it is about. I would pay that again.