Nine Ways Not to Start a Novel: Discarded First Lines
1. We were lying in the dark.
2. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but like the bottom layer of the ocean, where nothing lives and nothing grows.
3. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but thick and black as paint.
4. Lights Out was at ten o’clock and it brought the darkest night I’d ever seen.
5. It was dark.
6. Today the Hospital was going to look inside our minds.
7. After the pilgrims, life in the Hospital changed.
8. We never understood what they could have wanted from us.
9. Everything was a story.
Laura van den Berg’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award. She lives in Baltimore and is revising a novel, which, thankfully, no longer begins with any of these lines.
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