Loose Change

The birthday celebration glow had left days ago and this morning when I woke up  I remembered I was fifty.  I also remembered what I’d been trying really hard to forget…all the way back to when my best buddy turned twenty one the day before my birthday and we celebrated with champagne and gummi bears (disgusting together, by the way) and spent all of my birthday recovering.  She wasn’t going to be celebrating her birthday any more.  She’d taken care of that a few months ago.  She’d never be fifty and it still hurt.

“I had a great time last night!”  My husband emerged from the bathroom, half in and half out of his business uniform – dress shirt and tie and underpants.  “The Eagles of Death Metal rocked.”

You have to love a middle-aged man who can say that and mean it.  When you don’t want to kill him.

Opening lines, one of the many hooks an author has to plant, have to mean something.  If you can’t suck the reader in with those lines, when the heck are you going to do it?  No, they aren’t meant to fill you in on everything that happened up to that point (in conversations, people like that are called bor-ing and the same goes for stories.) That waits until you’ve teased the reader into dying to know what happens next and why it happened at all.

Of course you don’t confuse them to the point that they turn off and say they don’t care (in conversations, people like that are called just too strange.)  But most writers who fail opening lines tend to the “let me explain what you are about to learn” school.  Trust your reader a little more.  Tease your reader a little more.  Always remember to have safe sex…whoops, sorry, I digress.  But opening lines are like chatting up someone you’re interested in.  If you think they aren’t going to get your opening line, think of a better opening.  And obviously you think this person is worth your while, so don’t treat them like an idiot.  Make them want to finish the story with you.

Treva Harte
www.loose-id.com