June 9, 2025
I can’t be the only one who hears a sentence in their mind and thinks, “that would be a great line to start a book.” So many times throughout my day I find myself composing opening lines, thinking of the emotional punch they might provide or the intrigue they are sure to elicit from readers. In one sentence, it should beg the reader to ask: Who is this character? What do they want? What just happened to them? It’s these same questions that dart around like moths to the light in my mind when approaching social situations with new people to meet for the first time. It only makes sense that when someone approaches a book, the same questions smack into the foreground of the mind, searching for not just a deeper meaning or connection, but perhaps for relief from the stress of our own lives.
And yet, like so many of these questions and opening lines that bounce into my thoughts, the path often leads nowhere. It’s just a step, a brief pause, and then, like you, I’m pulled back into my own predicaments, be it bills, laundry, appointments to keep, places to be. This leads me to ask a vital question in not just writing but in life: How can a book, and a person, keep our interests beyond the initial curiosity that as humans, we are programmed to have but not wired to keep? With social media fighting for every second of our attention, sticking to one thing, one book for more than a single line or page seems almost impossible.
It’s the same insatiable affair with book ideas. I can’t count the number of times (not because I can’t count, mind you, but because it is so numerous I have forgotten the number) that a person has uttered the words: wouldn’t that make a great book? And yes, usually it would, especially if it starts with the profound and universal book set up question of, “what if…?” Again, as humans, we innately are drawn to the mysterious, to wondering about different courses of action, different paths we didn’t or couldn’t take for whatever reason. But like those decisions we left floating away in the winds, the idea often fizzles out so we can get back to the life at hand, the mostly mundane moments we do somehow find ourselves immersed within. Only later, as the lights fall low and the sun sets on another day, do we sometimes hear the whispers of those lost dreams, those lost ideas. They may reappear in our nightly escapades, the world beyond our lids that slides back into oblivion once the light of day casts its long rays of responsibility back onto us.
I can’t be the only one who thinks about all the lives we haven’t lived, all the what ifs that may not only be great opening lines for a bestseller but in our own lives. Just look at Marvel and their dive into the multiverse, the alternate realms that could somehow quench our thirst for knowing what could have been had we just done this or that instead.
But that leaves us all at the same place then, doesn’t it? Lost within the very nature of our curiosity, waiting for something to stick, wanting for a line to last longer than the trifle second in which we gave our attention to it. So yes, indeed, most things could make great opening lines. Yes, they would be great books. But the real rub, the one that we don’t say aloud but that we all know is true: it takes more than just a great opening line to find your way to the end credits. Whether it be ideas, dreams, books, or life, it’s the same. And yet ….wouldn’t it be fantastic if during that video montage at the end of our favorite stories, as the notes soar high in the still vibrating air of deeper realization, welling up within each and everyone of us are the emotions of a lifetime, leaving not a dry eye, or sore heart, in sight.
A moment of musing that perhaps will lead you to consider not just an opening line, but how to make it your story.