twentysomethingtales:

I just started reading Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The first sentence:

“When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”

This is the sentence that made me want to quit writing, or even trying. It prompted me to get wrapped up in an unanswerable thought whirlpool of “What makes a great first sentence?” Murakami’s describes a horribly mundane action, although perhaps it would have a different flavor if I knew the tune of The Thieving Magpie. But how many of his readers know what this is? Or is this sentence actually really complex and nuanced despite its straightforwardness? It’s certainly not one of those “It was the best of times” sentences. Either way, I was drawn in.

Then, tried to think of simple openers myself. Began thinking of objects. Hair dryers. Doorknobs. Ketchup bottles. Then actions. Looking. Sitting. Standing. Cooking. Watching. In the end, all my sentences sounded like my 8th grade short stories or the beginnings of soft core porn. Why so hard? Made me realize that writing a simple, easy first sentence to a book (a good one) is just about impossible to do.

Jesus. I need to stop writing too.