How to Write an Opening Sentence
Iain Banks manages to provide both one of the most memorable opening sentences:<p>"It was the day my grandmother exploded."<p>and my favourite opening paragraph (or two):<p>"Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains, and in my dying moments look forward to an encounter with Staffa’s six-sided columns and Fingal’s cave; or I might head south to Corryvrecken, to be spun inside the whirlpool and listen with my waterlogged deaf ears to its mile-wide voice ringing over the wave-race; or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.<p>Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is . . . just to try and explain."<p>From <i>The Crow Road</i> and <i>Espedair Street</i> respectively.