5. Beginnings, or How to Get People’s Attention

George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, cover by Shepard Fairey

‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

We’re just over the halfway point in my guide to writing blurbs for novels and you’re probably wondering when we’re going to get around to actually looking at writing a blurb. Finally, that moment has arrived. By now, we should know what story it is we want to sell. We have an idea in our heads of our audience. We also have our one-line pitch to emotionally hook in our reader. Now we need to grab their attention with a powerful opening. But what kind of opening do we want?

Beginnings, as anyone who has stared at a blank page or screen appreciates, can be paralysing. They tend to be leaps into the unknown – for writer and reader, alike. However, in this instance we have two distinct advantages. Firstly, you are likely to have already written or edited the novel already – so we know what we’re writing about. And secondly, by having done some groundwork on who we are talking to and what they might like we have some sense of what we want our copy to do.

The single most important thing your opening line needs to do is grab your reader. I’ve watched people picking up books in bookshops. Intrigued by something on the cover (title, author, image, shout line or some combination), they pick up the book. They turn it over and within a handful of seconds they’ve put it down again and moved on to the next book. What was the deal breaker? What did they read that turned them off? It certainly wasn’t the entire blurb. There wasn’t time to read all of it. And that’s the awful truth for the writer of blurbs. Most people never read the whole thing.

Which is why we need to start with something strong and unignorable. You want the reader to want to keep on reading even if they’ve already decided this book isn’t for them. They have to keep going just because, dammit, you’ve intrigued them. That way you’ve still got a chance to win them over. So how do we do this?

It is at this point that I suggest turning to the classics. But not the blurbs of classic novels (just yet). I mean classic opening lines to novels. What are those arresting lines that have stayed with us since the moment we first read them, and which took us into another world from which we may never quite ever left? What can we learn from these lines in beginning our blurbs?

Take the opening quote to this post. The first line of perhaps the most famous and widely read science fiction novel of the twentieth century. It is a brilliantly constructed sentence designed with but one purpose in mind and that is to draw in the innocent reader and then utterly wrongfoot them at the last moment. Everything is perfectly reasonable, recognisable and normal until the last word, ‘thirteen’, which loudly declares that something is clearly wrong with the world.

To my mind this line exemplifies one of the key aspects of a good opening gambit: it stirs your curiosity. By the end of the line you are asking yourself how can all the clocks be striking thirteen*? What is this place? What (and here is its real power) has gone awry? Emotions are triggered: confusion, uncertainty, bafflement, intrigue. Some people will not like them but for others they will be stimulating. What’s going on? Can clocks strike thirteen – how? What would a world look like in which this was true? If you’re stimulated by this counterintuitive line, then you will likely read on. Job done, Mr Orwell.

Here’s another famous opening line (from a book published a century earlier):

Jane Eyre:

‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.’

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre opens with a line that drops you straight into the story.

You are immediately in the middle of something – though you do not yet know what. But you’ll have questions. Why can’t there be a walk? There not being a walk seems to be a problem. And who is making this assessment? You have questions and questions need answers. And so you read on. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Tell the reader something but leave them hanging. Answer their questions but leave them with further questions. Keep them turning the pages. Writing a blurb is in many ways the same as writing a novel – only you’ve got a thousandth of the word count to play with.

Opening lines like Jane Eyre’s, I believe, are immersive. They drop you straight into the story and leave you with questions. Questions that a blurb should in part – but only in part – answer.

Finally, I believe, there is a third kind of opening line. This is the emotional or atmospheric line, one which creates a feeling in the reader. Take the start of this:

Eric Jong’s Fear of Flying

‘There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.’

Similarly, lines that make you laugh (‘Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.’) or fill you with dread (‘The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.’) or joy (‘I exist!’) or melancholy (‘Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.’) or wonder (‘The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries.’), or any feeling that you are looking for, will pull you in as a reader. An emotional response has been triggered – you like it and hopefully want more of it.

Counterintuitive, atmospheric/emotional or immersive: these, I believe, are three different (though sometimes over lapping) and potentially powerful approaches for your blurb’s opening line as you seek to hook the reader’s attention. So what do these approaches look like on actual books? Below are some opening lines to book blurbs taken from my book shelves. I’ve put them in the category I personally think they most belong in. You may well disagree – again, it’s not an exact science.

Curiosity/counterintuitive – you’re intrigued:

· After the Internet, what came next? [1]

· The mystery of Ryhope wood had obsessed George Huxley to the point of madness. [2]

· 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new night life. [3]

· This is the story of Sam and Sadie. It’s not a romance, but it is about love. [4]

· Robert Forester is a nice guy, but he is also a prowler. [5]

· No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. [6]

· Jackie and a group of fellow rebel women have escaped the Authority’s repressive regime, forming a militia in the far north of Cumbria. [7]

· Wilmet Forsyth is fairly young, good-looking, well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded and rather bored. [8]

Emotional/atmospheric – creates a specific emotional response:

· What happens when old spies come out to play one last game? [9]

· Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort he offered him a job. [10]

· With its ruthless concision and artful mysteries, Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is lightning in a bottle. [11]

· If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney – that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the arish priest. [12]

· Change or die. [13]

Immersive – you’re there, but you want to know more:

· Ten strangers are invited to Soldier Island, an isolated rock off the Devon coast. [14]

· One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay’s cramped New York bedroom, his arduous, nerve-racking escape fro Prague finally achieved. [15]

· Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. [16]

· This be the tale of how I bring the cure to all the nighted states, save every poory children, short for life. [17]

In conclusion, I believe it is worth interrogating what your opening line is doing and whether it is the right approach. Whatever line you choose to begin with should depend on the story you’re selling and on what emotions you want to trigger in your audience. It is worth trying out these different approaches to see where they get you. Because this is our leaping off point for the rest of the blurb. It will send us down a certain route. One we’ll explore in our next post, on the power of opposites to structure your blurb.

* I wonder how much this wonderful line now resonates in a world that to some degree has replaced the twelve-hour analogue clock with the twenty-four digital one. Not to mention who now is aware that thirteen strikes of a clock was once an indicator of doubt . . .

· [1] Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson

· [2] Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

· [3] Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

· [4] Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

· [5] The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

· [6] Ice by Anna Kavan

· [7] The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall

· [8] A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

· [9] Spook Country by William Gibson

· [10] Mort by Terry Pratchett

· [11] Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

· [12] The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

· [13] Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

· [14] And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

· [15] The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

· [16] Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

· [17] The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman

The fifth of eight in a series of posts on how to write a novel’s cover copy, revised and republished from original publication at the Milford SF writers’ blog in Summer 2020.