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Great Opening Lines – and Why! (Oct 2021’s Great Opening Lines) #togetherwerise https://josephcarrabis.com/2021/10/31/great-opening-lines-and-why-oct-2021s-great-opening-lines/ #Atmosphere #Characters #Critiquing #GreatOpeningLines #Mood #Setting #StoryCrafting #Tone

An Experiment in Writing – Part 43: A Humbling Experience – Robin Wilkey Gregory’s Killing Time #togetherwerise https://josephcarrabis.com/2025/08/06/an-experiment-in-writing-part-43-a-humbling-experience-robin-wilkey-gregorys-killing-time/ #ExperimentsinWriting #ForAuthors #GreatOpeningLines #Mood #Setting #StoryCrafting #Style #Tone

#GreatOpeningLines #MardyGrothe

Now THIS is a great opening line!!

Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and S o a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.

“Until Gwen,” in The Atlantic (June 2004)
by Dennis Lehane, born August 4, 1965

In a 2005 Boston Globe article, Bella English revealed that Lehane *had this opening sentence kicking around in his head for eight years, but no place to put it” She continued: *He couldn't for the life of him find the right vehicle for it: it just didn't fit into anything he was working on. Then he was asked to write a short story for an anthology, with one requirement: It had to have. something to do with fathers and sons." In 2 2014 article in the Hunger Mountain Review (" Ways to Seduce Your Reader"), writer and editor Miciah Bay Gault hailed this as an “all-time favorite” and cleverly described it as “a speed-date of a first line.” She added: “In one sentence we leam about the narrator’s crappy childhood, crappy present life, criminal background, and criminal father. We get a sense of the characters relative ages and a bit of the setting. In this line we understand that daddy is perfectly willing to put his son in jeopardy. Because the narrator has chosen to let us in on that fact, we sympathize with a potentially unsympathetic protagonist and we believe he wants to go straight. Wow. That's a lot to pack into one line, a powerful first sentence that seduced me into reading more”

#GreatOpeningLines #DrMardyGrothe #Quotes #JohnUpdike

"Pity the poor bore. He stands among us as a creature formidable and familiar yet in essence unknowable. We can read of the ten infallible signs whereby he may be recognized and of the seven tested methods whereby he may be rebuffed.

Valuable monographs exist upon his dress and diet; the study of his mating habits and migrational routes is well past the speculative stage; and statistical studies abound. One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.” John Updike Confessions of a Wild Bore (1965)

#Quotes #GeorgeBurns #GracieAllen #Biography #Comedy #GreatOpeningLines #MardyGrothe

For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.
George Burns Gracie: A Love Story (1988)

#DrMardysQuotes #GreatOpeningLines #JayMcInerney

#GreatOpeningLines

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