I don't have a title for this one.

     Joanne called from Dr. J's office late yesterday afternoon, as I was leaving to fetch A from school. The plan is for Dr. J to consult with Dr. W on my chemo chart/history and get back to me. I hope getting back to me means an appointment in the infusion center, not some rhetorical conversation about limited options and pain relief. At least they're not talking about surgery -- that I know of. Hope I didn't jinx it just then.

     I went to workshop last night (novel) and we talked about favorite first lines in literature. The consensus seemed to be that lines that set the tone/voice or introduce relationships or settings are nice, but what really pulls a reader in is putting characters in play -- putting them in peril, giving them a sharply defined dilemma, conveying the whole world of the novel. Somehow.

     I favor lines that give a narrator (first or third person) a reason to be telling the story right then, right there. Kind of a, "Well it all began when..." sort of thing. For instance:

• "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude) 

     That's a famous example and for good reason. Does an awful lot of heavy lifting, and it's lyrical and beautifully rendered to boot. Another:

• "Fifteen minutes before happiness left him, Josh Goldin led his summer intern by the elbow to share in the hallelujah of a Friday afternoon." (Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You)

     Again we're looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and I love that hallelujah image. It's as though the narrator is taking the reader by the arm and saying, I'll get to why happiness left him in a minute, but first you need to know what came before. It all started when..." Here are two more that suck me in but good:

• "First, I had to get the body in the boat." (Rhian Ellis, After Life)
• "My name was Salman, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." (Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

     WHAM! We're there. How can you not keep reading? Although with the Sebold, the first thirty pages or so were among the roughest I'd ever read; I nearly couldn't continue. Actually, I quoted the first two sentences here, but the first one does the work with the past tense, was, telegraphing that this is a narrator whose earthly existence is in question. The second line is the payoff.

     One of my favorite writers, whose work lately has been pejoratively labeled chicklit (lately, because the term and the notion didn't exist when her books hit U.S. markets), is Banana Yoshimoto. Youngest person ever to win the Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award when she was 22 or thereabouts. She was translated to English for the first time in the late eighties/early nineties, and a whisp of a novel that came out in Japan in 1991, Goodbye, Tsugumi, was released in the U.S. only in the last three or four years. (I don't have it in front of me.) Anyway, the first line is:

• "It's true: Tsugumi really was an unpleasant young woman."

     Here's what I love about it: It sets a chatty, conspiratorial tone. It establishes three brains: the narrator, the reader whom she is addressing, and this character named Tsugumi about whom we are eager, suddenly, to learn everything. Yoshimoto's sentences are just this simple and straightforward throughout her work, yet the cumulative effect is a deep reckoning with what makes people tick; their motivations. Their fears, needs, and desires. And how can they help each other thrive? It's subtle, gorgeous writing. 

     The first line of my novel is crap, but I'll make it better once I find out what the thing is about. The only way to do that is to (cough) write it. 

     I'll just be over here, writing, if anyone's looking for me.