Once you’ve finished your story’s first draft, your job is to go back and throw away most of what you’ve written. If you’re lucky (or very good), you won’t need to discard quite so much. Some very few extremely gifted authors could begin at the beginning, write until the end, and then do only a very little polishing.

I am not one of these people, and neither are you.

The key to editing is to understand what you want to have when you’re done. At the beginning of your finished story will be your opening line, called “the hook”.  The purpose of the hook is identical to that on a fishing lure: it’s there to catch your reader and keep him from getting away.  The best hooks are clean, sharp, and heavily barbed.

Fashioning the perfect hook is an art form all its own, and entire books have been devoted to the subject.  Devotees compare the simple beauty of “Call me Ishmael” with “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”, and even that timeless classic, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  For my money, one of the best is, “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

Go back and reread that sentence. Think about it.

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

You see this and naturally you’re curious, because, first, it’s his favorite book and that by itself is inviting, and second, there’s a question:  How can he have never read his favorite book?  The imagination immediately takes off.  Is it a huge tome entitled “How To Kill Insects” that he uses to bash ants?  Does he, perhaps, sleep between the pages as another man might use sheets?  Maybe he absorbs its meaning through osmosis?

It’s clean. There are no extraneous parts; every word serves a specific purpose. A fanatic might be tempted to trim “in all the world”, but that would be an error because they set the mood for the whole book, one from which the author seldom deviates.

It’s sharp. There is a point, and it reaches you. If it doesn’t, that’s important too; it means you aren’t the right person for this story. I pity you.

It’s barbed. There is a question built into the statement, one you feel you need to answer.

The story in question is “The Princess Bride”, by William Goldman, and now you want to read it.

Fair enough.  You should.  And, when you craft the opening line for your next story, you have worse ideals to strive for than that one.

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