The first page of your book or story is essential, arguably as important as the entire remainder, since it determines whether readers will read on.

What makes a powerful opening? To find the answer for yourself, pull a half dozen favorite books off the shelf and reread their first pages. Even if they are not similar, ask yourself what they have in common.

For this note, I reached for six of my own favorites, some new, some less new, some classics, all ready to had in the shelves near my desk because I had read or referred to them recently.

Here are their openings:

I sing the city.

Fucking city. I stand on the rooftop of a building I don't live in and spread my arms and tighten my middle and yell nonsense ululations at the construction site that blocks my view.

—NK Jemisin, The City We Became

Bunny did not waken all at once. A sound (what he did not know) struck the surface of his sleep and sank like a stone. His dream subsided, leaving him awake, stranded, on his bed.

—William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.

—Viet Than Nguyen, The Sympathizer

Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford, where my mother's people came from.

—Claire Keegan, Foster

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravages."

—Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black Levis, suede jacket, sneakers and a big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.

—Thomas Pynchon, V.

If I had to say what these lines share, it's dynamism. There is an energy to each — even to the Maxwell, which is about a sleeping child, but one who's just been startled awake like some sort of inverse Marcel Proust — that makes the reader want to move ahead, to find out where we are and whom we're with and what will happen next. For two of the passages, the Pynchon and the Keegan, there is literal motion, the outset of a journey we want to tag along on. For the others there's a dichotomy of some sort — ravaged beauty versus youth, celebration and acursedness, the duality of the spy — that rouses our curiosity by setting up a potential energy. How will the character or the story get from one to the other? We are invited to wonder.

This quick analysis makes me want to rewrite the openings of everything I have on my desk right now into more quick, rhythmic sentences that are as tautly strung as I can make them.

PROMPT

You may find other qualities in your favorites that strike you as the pivotal ones. There are myriad great first lines, and almost as many potentially effective narrative strategies. Once you isolate what works for you as a reader, emulate it as a writer!

Here are a few further strategies for honing your opening.

• Look at your first page, if you have one, and scour it for unnecessary words, inessential uses of the verb to be, extra adjectives or adverbs, and anything less than riveting prose. Try to cut it by a third. Consider changing the order, skipping, rearranging. What about starting a moment before? By the end of this page, your reader needs to be hugely curious about something, enough so to turn the page.

• Consider whether some other scene (which is your absolute favorite? which seems most memorable to you?) in what you have written is a better beginning. Make a clone document and try it, rearranging things to fit the new order.

• A pastiche. If you don't have a beginning yet (or even if you do), search your bookshelves or the library or your memory for three openings you really love. They could be in any form or scale of work — a novel, a poem, a story — and do not necessarily need to be of the same scale or same form in which you're working. If there's something you remember but don't have a copy of, track down the text. Here, the granular is what matters. It's about the exact wording, paragraphing, sentence length. Read these three openings over. And over. Then choose one to model your own opening lines on, in some way. Is it the sentence structure, the imagery, the voice? Isolate what transfixes you. Then read your chosen model over several more times, possibly out loud. Consider transcribing it. Why do you think it is so good? Finally, decide on one great thing you can borrow from it for your own opening. Then put the model aside and go at it for yourself, without looking back. You want to capture something from the model but also, of course, tap your own voice.

• Revisit your beginning every time you make a major plot change or finish a draft. It may benefit from tweaks — or more.

If you felt your opening is already solid, this is something you can do with an ending, a climax or the beginning of a chapter or part as well.

A few other great first pages.