I love studying superb sentences.  I get almost unparalleled pleasure from uncovering how parts of a sentence work together to produce an effect.  You could imagine my delight when I discovered Allegra Hyde’s beautifully-articulated essay “What Makes a Great Opening Line?”.

Why, Hyde wonders, does one fall in love at first sentence?

In our distracted age when the average person has an attention span of 8.25 seconds (less than the easily sidetracked goldfish), why is it that some books engross us from the very first sentence?  When we pick up a volume in the new releases section, why do we bring some to the cash register and return others to where we found them?

After polling her readers about their favorite first lines, Hyde realizes all great openings have two things in common: clarity and curiosity.  Hyde defines clarity as “the ability of a first sentence to give readers an initial hand-hold for place and/or time and/or character and/or plot.”

Why is clarity so crucial?

Think about it.  When you first begin a novel, you know virtually nothing: you don’t know who the characters are, what conflicts drive the story.  Most likely, your knowledge of the book is limited to the brief blurb on the back cover.  At most, you’ve read a review in The New Yorker.  When you open to the first page, you and the book are essentially strangers.  The first line gets us acquainted with each other.  As Hyde writes, “Every word in that first sentence is an opportunity to shine a light on what is to come— to give a reader enough information to stabilize them in some degree of who and where and what the story is about.”

The second quality of a captivating opening line is curiosity.  In the same way a distant crush is made more appealing by the very fact that we don’t know him, a first sentence can only charm if there’s a degree of mystery (after all, if we knew everything there was to know from the first few words, why would we keep reading?).

Or to bring it back to the dating analogy: imagine your date reveals his most intimate longings, recounts his most traumatic experiences, and confides his deepest secrets within 45 minutes of the first date.  Before your tiramisu even arrives at the table, you already know his parents divorced when he was 7 and he always felt like he existed in his older brother’s shadow.

Would you go on a second date?

Probably not.

When we’re first getting to know someone, we don’t want to learn everything about them on date #1.  Part of the fun of dating is the process of getting to know someone.  In the same way, the joy of reading lies in the process of unraveling a book’s enigmas.  A first line— like a first date— divulges just enough to make the reader want more.

An opening is an irresistible strip tease.  A stellar sentence doesn’t reveal everything all at once: it removes a fur coat before shedding a black lace bra.  It is this very delay of gratification that seduces us.  An enticing first line leaves something critical left unsaid/unknown.  “Conceal, don’t reveal” (or, at least, don’t reveal too much) is the first line’s mantra.

Let’s analyze these two forces at work in Donna Tartt’s A Secret History.

Her chilling prologue begins:

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.  He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.  It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.

It is difficult to believe that Henry’s modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events.  We hadn’t intended to hide the body where it couldn’t be found. In fact, we hadn’t hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing.  This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until the snow above it was packed down like ice.”

Tartt’s first line is a masterclass in balancing clarity and curiosity.  Her opening is grounded in concrete, specific nouns (“snow”/”mountains”) and clues us into the setting (a quaint New England town in early spring).  Indeed, the sentence astonishes with its clarity.  If we were to analyze it with the mathematical precision of Joan Didion dissecting her idol, Ernest Hemingway, we might note that Tartt’s opening line is composed of a compact 25 words, the majority of which are only 1 syllable.  There are no stylistic flourishes, nothing elaborate or ornamental.  The first line is so straightforward that it could be understood by an 8-year-old.

Though it answers crucial questions about character and setting (clarity), the prologue still manages to maintain mystique (curiosity).  Who, we wonder, is Bunny and why has he been slaughtered?  Who killed him?  And why is it only weeks later that Richard, our narrator, understands the “gravity” of the situation?

Interestingly, Tartt gives it up right away.  In the next paragraph, we learn that Bunny’s gruesome death was a part of Henry’s “modest plan.”  The use of the first person plural “we” (“We hadn’t intended to hide the body where it couldn’t be found”) reveals the charming narrator who brought us into his confidence just moments ago was actually part of the grisly murder.

From the very first page, we know “who-done-it”— Richard and his prep school friends— but we have no idea what drives their actions.  Revealing who did it from page one seems to violate every rule of Mystery Writing 101.  After all, what’s the point of reading about a crime if the culprit has already been found out?  Locating the killer is why we watch the Scream franchise and read Agatha Christie novels.  Yet Tartt manages to make The Secret History just as thrilling as any knife-wielding slasher film.  We may know that Richard kills Bunny from the get go, but the more compelling question— why he kills Bunny— remains obscure to us.  It’s this question of motive that compels us to keep reading, a genius technique on Tartt’s part.

In a brilliant 1992 interview, Tartt confesses she learned how to create tension from the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock.  In her mesmerizing Mississippi accent, she explains, “Suspense doesn’t come from a bomb thrown from nowhere…suspense comes from having two people sitting talking at a table, there’s a bomb ticking underneath the table.”

“And,” the interviewer interjects, “you don’t know when it’s going to go off.”

In The Secret History, Bunny’s murder is the ticking time bomb: we know it’s going to explode, but we have no idea when (or how exactly) it’s going to go off.  Our curiosity keeps us reading— even though we know the punch line to Tartt’s disturbing joke from page 1.