It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines . . .

Today we have Carolyn J. Rose joining Writers Who Kill as our guest blogger on Salad Bowl Saturdays. Her guest blog got me wondering exactly how important that first line is. What do you think?

Your opinion counts and when you leave a comment, we’ll put your name in the drawing for a copy of No Substitute for Money.

~ Jim

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If you’re an avid reader, especially one with a to-be-read pile leaning like the Tower of Pisa, you’re probably well aware of the significance of a first line. It can draw you in to another world, set the scene, and establish what’s at stake. Or it can prompt you to look again at the TBR pile, consider how time is fleeting, and set that book aside in favor of another.

If you’re a writer, I’ll bet my lunch money (Roughly $4.67. What can I say? I’m frugal.) that you’ve come awake in the heart of the night with an all-time great first line flashing in your brain. It’s a line on a par with the greatest first lines of any list on the Internet. It’s right up there with: “It was the best of times . . .” “It was the day my grandmother exploded. . .” “I was born twice . . .” “The past is a foreign country . . .”

You might switch on the lamp, scrabble in the nightstand for a pencil or a pen that actually works, and scrawl that line on a bookmark, tissue, or even your arm. On rare occasions, you might be able to read that line in the morning. Sometimes you even think it’s still a darn good line—or at least not a darn bad line.

But now, what do you do with it?

Sure, the first step is to type it out and add it to your collection of other all-time great lines. But after that?

Do you carry it like a sacrificial lamb to your critique group and watch them shear it? Or even slaughter it? Do you save it for a day when writers’ block has you paralyzed and use it as a springboard for a couple of stream-of-consciousness pages to break the mental logjam? Do you stuff it in a drawer for a day when the power goes out and you need something to get a fire going? Do you enter it in the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest? Or do you commit yourself to writing hundreds of great lines to follow?

Here’s a line that came to me recently: Only by reminding myself that my knitting needles could be lethal weapons was I able to get through an afternoon with my aunt.

It won’t lead off my next book or the one after that—those are all planned out—but it might have a long career as a writing prompt for a workshop presentation.

Writers: If you have some all-time great—or even not-so-great—first lines you’ve penned, share them and tell us what you have planned for them.

Readers: If there’s a first line that hooked you and made you read on or is stuck in your mind because it’s so good—or so bad—please share that.

Leave a comment and we’ll put your name in the drawing for a copy of No Substitute for Money.

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Carolyn J. Rose is the author of several novels, including Hemlock Lake, Through a Yellow Wood, An Uncertain Refuge, Sea of Regret, A Place of Forgetting, No Substitute for Murder, and No Substitute for Money. She penned a young-adult fantasy, Drum Warrior, with her husband, Mike Nettleton.

She grew up in New York's Catskill Mountains, graduated from the University of Arizona, logged two years in Arkansas with Volunteers in Service to America, and spent 25 years as a television news researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. She founded the Vancouver Writers' Mixers and is an active supporter of her local bookstore, Cover to Cover. Her interests are reading, gardening, and not cooking.

You can find copies of No Substitute for Money at Amazon and Barnes & Noble