Hooked by the Second Sentence

So many online literary journals, so little time.

We skipped around this week to the small and big literary journals, and decided to sample what's out there for fiction first sentence hooks! What stands out to you? Sometimes it isn't the first sentence that hooks us, but maybe the second one. Our eyes read the first line quickly, and in a second our minds decipher the meaning, but by then we are already on to the second sentence. Perhaps it is the second one that truly hooks us.

Make this an exercise. Read the first lines below, and then go to the stories and read the first and second sentences. Were you hooked by the first sentence or did it happen after you read the second one?

Marigold wanted a Chihuaua.

By John Oliver Hodges from "Bristles" in the journal Compose

One of our family’s favorite films is the Cary Grant classic “Arsenic and Old Lace,” in which Grant’s young and dashing character, Mortimer Brewster, about to elope with his sweetheart, discovers that his adorable maiden aunts have been happily murdering lonely old men (which they consider putting the poor dears out of their misery) and having Mortimer’s delusional cousin, Teddy Brewster (who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt), bury them in the cellar.

By Suzanne Vincent from "Galloping Insanity" in the journal Flash Fiction Online

Nobody ever listens 2 me, says Flowerpower420.

By Eric Llloyd Blix from "Things I Sometimes Do: Real Estate Adventure" 

in the journal Paper Darts

Yancey swishes down the dirt road, feet aflutter.

By Ann Beattie from "Yancey" in the journal Paris Review

 This happened when there was a country called Yugoslavia.

By Yoko Tawada from "To Zagreb" in the journal Granta

Mnted a Chihuahua.

Marigold wanted a Chihuahua.

To Shock the Reader or Not

Is it overkill to begin your story with a first sentence that shocks the reader?
Here's a taste of three anticlimax openings:

She drugged her professor then took back her essay.

The man killed the boy's dog, leaving it on the driveway for the children selling lemonade to see.

Sure the kiss was tainted with poison but she'd rather die than let him live.

I think these first sentences show the most important thing coming first, followed by something less important, but is it too shocking for the reader?
Does it feel like the author is trying to force it too much? Or would you keep reading?

First Sentences are Doors to Worlds

Ursula Le Guin wrote these words to inspire us all to open a book and delve into a world of the writer's imagination but our own experience.

And as writers, we are singers carrying the reader through the door and along a journey in the new world.

She writes again:

“It is a rare and great pleasure to find a fantasist writing not only with the kind of accuracy of language absolutely essential to fantasy-making, but with real music in the words as well. Wherever Pat Rothfuss goes with the big story that begins with The Name of the Wind, he’ll carry us with him as a good singer carries us through a song.”

If you haven't read Patrick Rothfuss's book, The Name of the Wind, I will share with you the opening from the prologue. His words keep us wondering what happens next:

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

This opening immediately tilts the balance of our minds.
What, silence has three parts?
And it is night, so why is the Waystone Inn so quiet?

We need to know more. We are hooked.

Bad First Impressions

Off the book, I like to think we can recover from bad first impressions. After all, we've all been there.

The day we woke up too late to shower, or even brush our teeth.
Barking at our toddler in the grocery store, because the 100th "I want" has put us over the edge.
Making a joke within the first few minutes of meeting someone who doesn't have an ounce of understanding that life is too short to not be sarcastic.

How do we recover?

Apologize. Smile. Admit your mistake. Laugh at yourself. Make the right first impression the second and third time around.


But that's off the book.

How many times have you picked a book off a shelf in a store, read the first paragraph and put it back for whatever reason? It didn't hook you. Are you likely to pick it back up? The author can't be there, holding our hand, admitting the mistake, urging us to give it one more try.

I have picked some books back up and opened them to the first page again. But 9 times out of 10, I pick it up because I'm more curious about the idea of the book based on the synopsis on the back. Maybe the first few sentences didn't hook me. Maybe I was wrong to get a bad first impression. Maybe, just maybe the second impression will win me over.

If this is one of the main reasons I pick a book back up, hoping for a better impression, it tells me the synopsis on the back of the book is darn well important.

On the second read, however, if that first opening paragraph still hasn't hooked me, I put the book back on the shelf and move on.

Good thing humans are more forgiving when it comes to first impressions off the book!