In the film of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Leonard asks how Virginia's work is going, and she says (as I remember) "I think I've got the first line". A reviewer was scornful: how typical of Hollywood to have one banal speech standing in for the creative complexities of writing anything, let alone Mrs Dalloway. It is notoriously difficult to make drama out of writing (hence the clichés of the scrumpled pages and the clacking typewriter), but the reviewer was revealing how little he or she knows about writing fiction. I and lots of other writers know that's exactly how it is. A first line embodies so much of your project that when you realise you have that body it's a huge step forward.
On one hand, at least with a novel, you're unlikely to know what the first line must be until you know a lot about your project. On the other hand, at least in short fiction, my moleskine is full of first lines which arrived from nowhere, while I was doing something else. Each seemed to have some resonance, some intriguingness, about it that hints at story and emotion beyond its own compass, and I'll write the story to find out what it's all about. Those two hands can both be true because most of the following will be built - implicitly, and sometimes explicitly - into any first line:
- who's telling the story
- the voice (persona, but also tone - the spirit in which you're writing)
- where they're standing in time and space, relative to the story and the actors in it
- where the story starts (where, in the stream of the actions of these characters, the narration begins)
- some clue about setting and character/s (maybe facts, maybe just from the voice)
- what the story's "about": its subject and theme, but also in the old fashioned sense of what it's setting about doing for and to the reader
and above all
- the instability (if you don't know what I mean, see here)
I say "above all" because the chief purpose of your first line isn't to tell us where we are or who's talking, to explain the theme, or bag you an agent or a Booker. It may do any or all of those, but the chief function of a first line is to get us to read the second line: what is it, in that first line, which does that? For example, the first line of one of the voices in A Secret Alchemy is, "I do not sleep so well, these days, and wake early". It's the "these days" which draws in the reader, althought most of the rest of my bullet points are implicitly answered too.
It certainly wouldn't do any harm to grab twenty really good books that you know well, and look at why their first lines work (if they do) and then go to the library or the bookshop and look in twenty you don't know. Which grab you, and why? But I'd suggest that the way to find a really terrific first line of your own isn't to make carefully sure that yours ticks as many bullets (sorry, it's late) as possible. I'd suggest something much more intuitive: use the bullet-points to widen and deepen your sense of what the novel is and needs to be, and then wait. As Rose Tremain says, that's the one stage you can't make happen. The more and deeper you know your project, the more likely it is that it will come.
But don't forget that, unless you don't write novels in reading-order, you need a first line to get you going, if only because you need it to lead you to a second line, and a third. So if in all other ways (research, thinking, planning, children elsewhere) you're ready to start the novel, it may not be sensible to wait, doing other things, until the muse descends. You'll have a beautifully decorated house, but you won't have a novel. You may want to settle for a "that'll do" first line, for now. It's reasonably right for all the questions you've asked, but it's not right. That's okay. It's a tacking stitch, it's the common scaffold: there to enable you to move on. And once you have moved on, and by writing the novel have discovered infinitely more about what it's about (in both senses), then you can go back to it. And you may find that actually your fifth line is the right first line. Or most likely of all, the right first line is the opening of Chapter Three, where you'd written your way into the story and reached the moment where it really starts.
