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…so begins Neil Gaiman’s young adult novel The Graveyard Book. But what’s in a first line, anyway? Quite a lot, it would seem. It’s the first thing anyone reading your book or story will read, and could make or break their interest. It’s the difference between your readers being engaged, or putting your book down and picking something else off the shelf instead.

Now, I haven’t read The Graveyard Book, so maybe it’s a little disingenuous to write about it. I have read and enjoyed Gaiman’s American Gods, and Good Omens, the novel written with Terry Pratchett, so I’d probably enjoy it. Nevertheless, I’ve never forgotten about it, and it’s invariably the first thing I think of when my mind turns to first lines. There’s a reason why I’ve chosen this to be the first line of my first blog post – the first line of my whole website, if you will.

A few years ago, I taught a creative writing class (in English) to 14/15-year old students in Austria. One of our exercises was on first lines, and the students were given a worksheet with a number of such first lines of novels, and asked to choose their favourite.

Can you guess what happened? Their eyes glazed over and slid past “Call me Ishmael,” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.“

Every group in the class chose Gaiman’s line. “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” Of course they did, you may say. They were 14 and 15 years old and reading in a second language! They were never going to go for Melville, Dickens or Austen!

In my defence, I didn’t design the course, or the worksheet. But perhaps this was part of the point. It worked! They were drawn to that line, inspired by it. They wanted to know more. Gaiman stirred some feeling in them, evoked an image in their minds. They were the perfect age for young adult fantasy novels, and something about knives and darkness appealed to them. Teenagers, eh?