Creative Writing

Activity  Five: Openers

You can tell a lot about a story from its first sentence. A good first sentence "hooks" you, pulling you into the story with a quick jolt of action or mystery. But a great first sentence does way more than that - it establishes a tone (or feeling), it sticks in your mind, and it can even blow your mind. Select one of the following opening liners and use it to jumpstart a story idea.

 

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one gorillas there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets.

At six forty-five one summer morning, a green and white Golden Gate Transit bus was crossing The Golden Gate Bridge. The bus and its passengers were never found. It was the first of the Time Tornadoes.

I come from a family with a lot of dead people.

Wemberly worried about everything.

Ma, a mouse has to do what a mouse has to do.

When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news.

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

Someone was standing by his bed, a person completely unlike anyone Tendai had ever seen.

I never used to pay attention to the phases of the moon.

You see, I had this spacesuit.

I myself had two separate encounters with witches before I was eight years old.

It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

Coraline discovered the door a little after they moved into the house.

Mrs. Frisby, the head of a family of field mice, lived in an underground house in the vegetable garden of a farmer named Mr. Fitzgibbon.

Can you identify any of the above first-liners?