Opening Page Adrenaline

By Cassius O'Brien

What makes a great opener in a book?

The beginning of a book should have an adrenaline-infused first paragraph that kickstarts the story and sets the tone. When I select books to read I don't buy them unless I like the first page. 

By 'adrenaline-infused' I don't mean that every book has to start with an action-packed scene where the main character is hanging from a cliff, about to lose his grip (although that would be an awesome opener, as well). The adrenaline could build slowly, like in David Levithan's Every Day:

"I wake up.

Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It's not just the body—opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I'm fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. the body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you're used to waking up in a new one each morning. It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.

Everyday day I am someone else. I am myself—I know I am myself—but I am also someone else.

It has always been like this."

Levithan's opening paragraph drew me in to the mind of A, the main character. I immediately got the sense that something was very abnormal about his life and what was about to happen to him. It was like listening in on A's whispered thoughts. And I wanted to know more.

In Michael Northrop's Trapped, the adrenaline rush of the opener moves faster. He uses strong words and a choppy rhythm that brought me in to the scene and the action: 

"We were the last seven kids waiting around to get picked up from Tattawa Regional High School. It sounds like an everyday thing, but this wasn't an ordinary day. It was one of those bull's-eyes in history, one of those points where everything comes together, where, if you were at that place at that time, you were part of something big. It meant that we weren't going to get picked up, not that day and maybe not ever."

With his style of writing, Northrop even used the word 'you' to make me feel like I was in the story with the characters. The first page definitely delivered on adrenaline, and carried me through the entire book, at a fast and exciting pace.

When I was looking through my bookshelves for examples of not-so-great openers to compare Every Day and Trapped to, I pulled down Tentacles, by Roland Smith. I had received it as a gift. On the first page the opener definitely didn't grab me. No adrenaline here:

"Marty O'Hara did not realize how much he had missed his best friend, Luther Smyth, until Luther jumped out of the seaplane onto the dock at Cryptos Island. In fact, he was so excited to see Luther he didn't even notice the other, rather odd-looking passenger who had flown in with his gangly, flourescent-carrot-headed classmate."

Smith's first paragraph starts with a scene that isn't action-packed or even written with descriptive words, besides 'flourescent-carrot-headed.' The first scene doesn't' give a good taste of what's going to happen in the book and doesn't pull you in. In fact, I haven't read Tentacles yet, because the beginning just didn't' get me hooked enough to read it.

In my opinion, the beginning is everything.