Last lines. Late November. Wolf Hall.
Nov. 22nd, 2018 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essivecaseTo set the scene: it’s 2016, high summer in the northern hemisphere, and I’m on my way back from my first international conference as the miniature of an academic. I’m schlepping a poster tube to and from the other side of the world—I really had travelled to roughly where I would be if I drilled a hole straight through the earth from my hometown—and now it’s an encumbrance in the departure lounge. I am also deeply, excruciatingly sick. It’s the common cold, but I am, in constitution, more Anne De Burgh than Lizzie Bennett, and even the common cold is vicious when you’re about ten hours early for your connecting flight. I’m in a country where I don’t speak the language and there are few English books on sale to keep me company—which is fine, because I had been planning on reading Wolf Hall for a while, anyway.
Of course, I got about seventy pages into it before passing out for both legs of my flight—the airport in the middle is a smudge on my memory—and when I landed I didn’t pick it back up.
This turned out to be a grievous error, as I finally realised long before I finished reading Wolf Hall a week or so ago. Though, I am glad I started again from the beginning. There was so much I had forgotten. The reason I tell this story is not because it was one of the five stories I rehearsed in case of small talk while I was carrying the book about my person, but because it has the best last line of perhaps any book I’ve ever read. (Related: I am not particularly creative in the blog post title department.)
A couple of friends and I were chatting about the amount of importance we put on last lines, and first lines, but I’ll get to those in a moment. The question posed forced me to confront the fact that, despite what everyone has told me in good faith, I place far more import on last lines than first. This could be a subjective thing: I, personally, struggle so much with last lines that I dread the act of finishing a story more than I fear asking a waiter for a thing of water for the table. But then again, would I loathe last lines so much if I didn’t feel they were so key to the story? What you take from the last line is the last thing you get. A bad last line can leave you with an itch at best; at worst, it can tinge the whole story a different shade in hindsight.
So what of the first line? Most people will tell you that the first line needs to be the hook, the thing that gets people into the story. I once heard it said that your reader ought to be invested from the very first word. This is good advice, insofar as it reminds me to check that the first word of everything I write isn’t “the” or “it.” I think the importance of the first line is overstated. The first line’s key purpose is not to convince you to read something (you have probably already decided to do that!) but to tell you what kind of story you’re reading. The first line sets tone, atmosphere, and expectations: it situates you in the world of the story, which is necessary in order for any further exploration or subversion to occur. Of course, this ought to proliferate the first scene, and to an extent the rest of the story, but I think the force of the atmosphere’s presence should be particularly strong in the opening line. The first line of Wolf Hall is ‘So now get up.’ It’s good, but it’s still arguably part of an overall atmosphere-setting effect. I feel that, as a line taken on its own, the last holds much more power than the first.
Something to think about.
Of course, I got about seventy pages into it before passing out for both legs of my flight—the airport in the middle is a smudge on my memory—and when I landed I didn’t pick it back up.
This turned out to be a grievous error, as I finally realised long before I finished reading Wolf Hall a week or so ago. Though, I am glad I started again from the beginning. There was so much I had forgotten. The reason I tell this story is not because it was one of the five stories I rehearsed in case of small talk while I was carrying the book about my person, but because it has the best last line of perhaps any book I’ve ever read. (Related: I am not particularly creative in the blog post title department.)
A couple of friends and I were chatting about the amount of importance we put on last lines, and first lines, but I’ll get to those in a moment. The question posed forced me to confront the fact that, despite what everyone has told me in good faith, I place far more import on last lines than first. This could be a subjective thing: I, personally, struggle so much with last lines that I dread the act of finishing a story more than I fear asking a waiter for a thing of water for the table. But then again, would I loathe last lines so much if I didn’t feel they were so key to the story? What you take from the last line is the last thing you get. A bad last line can leave you with an itch at best; at worst, it can tinge the whole story a different shade in hindsight.
So what of the first line? Most people will tell you that the first line needs to be the hook, the thing that gets people into the story. I once heard it said that your reader ought to be invested from the very first word. This is good advice, insofar as it reminds me to check that the first word of everything I write isn’t “the” or “it.” I think the importance of the first line is overstated. The first line’s key purpose is not to convince you to read something (you have probably already decided to do that!) but to tell you what kind of story you’re reading. The first line sets tone, atmosphere, and expectations: it situates you in the world of the story, which is necessary in order for any further exploration or subversion to occur. Of course, this ought to proliferate the first scene, and to an extent the rest of the story, but I think the force of the atmosphere’s presence should be particularly strong in the opening line. The first line of Wolf Hall is ‘So now get up.’ It’s good, but it’s still arguably part of an overall atmosphere-setting effect. I feel that, as a line taken on its own, the last holds much more power than the first.
Something to think about.
