Today's First Line Friday Guest is my fellow Fall Fourteener, Joshua David Bellin, author of SURVIVAL COLONY 9.
So let's get started!
What are the opening lines of your book?
Survival Colony
Nine starts with a single word of
dialogue, the name of my main character: “Querry.” The word is spoken by
Querry’s father as he wakes his son in the middle of the night during an attack
on their camp. Here’s a little bit more:
“Querry.”
My dad’s
voice in the dark.
“Son. Come on.
Time to get moving.”
His hand on
my shoulder, shaking me from sleep.
“Querry. On your feet.
Now.”
I opened my
eyes to more darkness and my dad’s shadowy shape filling the tent. I couldn’t make out his face, but I could
hear his quiet breath. There was no
urgency in his voice, there never was, but I knew this was for real.
Were these lines set from the first draft? And if
not, how many times do you think you've changed them?
You’d think that with a single word, nothing would have
changed, right? Wrong! I never changed the idea of using a single word of
dialogue to open the book, and the lines that follow that word remained almost
exactly the same from first draft to final version. But the word itself changed
many times. In the first draft, the word was “Son.” In a later draft, the word
was “Hey.” Before I’d fully established the characters, their speech patterns,
and the way they related to each other, I even experimented with “Boy.” But in
the end, I decided the main character’s name was the right choice.
Why do you think this opening is perfect for your
novel?
A couple reasons. First, Querry is an amnesiac, so I wanted
to open the novel abruptly, in a disorienting way, with the reader knowing no
more about what’s going on than he does. But also, for reasons I can’t delve
into without giving away major surprises, it’s important that the first word in
the book is Querry’s name. And that’s all I’m going to say about that!
Give us your favorite opening line(s) from a
favorite book, and tell us why you love them:
Can I
give two? My first would have to be from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground
there lived a hobbit.” I love the rhythm of the language, and also how this
line sets up so many questions: “What’s a hobbit? Why do they live in holes?
What’s interesting or special about this particular hobbit?” I also love the
opening line from Roger Zelazny’s sci-fi/fantasy novel Nine Princes in Amber: “It was starting to end, after what seemed
most of eternity to me.” I love the mystery (What’s “it”? Why is “it” starting
to end?), and I also love how this line throws the reader right into the narrator’s
experience. Zelazny’s narrator is an amnesiac too, and we’re immediately as
confused as he is. Who knows--maybe that’s where I got the idea for the opening
lines of my book!
Love it!
SURVIVAL COLONY 9 is out September 23!!