How to Grab a Reader in One Sentence

"The door-knob turned, then rattled." "How do you get rid of a superman?" "Murdering Stein was easy." The golden-age SF writers, working for a penny a word in magazines fighting for a reader's attention on a crowded newsstand, became masters of a very particular art: the sentence that makes you unable to stop.

An opening line has one job, to buy the second line. But the great ones do more. They establish a voice, plant a threat, or pose a question so sharp you have to keep reading to resolve it. Notice how many of the best are flatly declarative: no throat-clearing, no weather, no "it was a dark and stormy." Just a fact so strange or so ominous that your eye is already moving to the next sentence.

The three moves

Read enough of them and the patterns emerge. There's the cold open, a line that drops you into the middle of something already gone wrong ("Murdering Stein was easy"). There's the direct question, which conscripts you into the story's problem ("How do you get rid of a superman?"). And there's the quiet menace, a small, domestic detail with a shadow behind it ("The bed woke them").

Read the best of them

We read every story in the library and pulled out the openings, and the endings, that stopped us cold. You can browse them in the Great Openings & Endings gallery. Each line is a doorway: find one that grabs you, and the whole story is free to read on the other side. It's the fastest way to discover a writer you'll love.