First Lines Meme!

[thrillingdetectivetales]

A lovely little meme I borrowed from the delightful darvyn:

List the first lines of your last 10 stories (if you have fewer than 10, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line.

1. GOTTA GET YOU INTO MY LIFE
Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich, 8K+, Explicit

Chaperoning his little sister’s sleepover wasn’t high on Ian Gallagher’s list of favored weekend plans, and yet, here he was at ten o’clock on a Friday, watching the Nightmare on Elm Street remake with half an eye while he waited for some shenanigan or another to ensue.

2. MANNAGIMY
Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich, 2K+, Teen

It was going on eleven o’clock and the impromptu party at the shithole fixer-upper Lip Gallagher was renting with his high-strung baby mama was finally starting to wind down.

3. CURTAIN CALL
one-sided Roy Harper/Jason Todd, 1K+, Gen

While it probably shouldn’t register with any real import on the lengthy list of humiliating things Roy Harper has done in his life, his stomach turns in shame and self-loathing with every miserable second he’s forced to spend sitting around one of Gotham’s many dilapidated factory buildings, overseeing the arrest of a teen psychopath and the last living evidence of one of his worst mistakes to date.

4. HIGHWAY TO THE EDGE
Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich, 11K+, Mature, WIP

It was just Mickey’s fucking luck that when he finally managed to pin Frank Gallagher down—stumbling out of the Alibi all on his drunken and easily subdued lonesome—the cops showed up to throw a wrench into his admittedly slapdash murder plot.

5. DEOCH-AN-DORIS
James Bond/Q, 15K+, Teen

Bond received the summons just after midnight—a simple text message set to the unassuming trill of MI6’s emergency ringtone that read:

Mum expects you home by 0100. Sis called, she needs a ride.

6. ADEMAINS A LA PROCHAINE
Bud ‘Runner’ Conley/Robert Leckie, 1K+, Gen

The offices of the Bergen Evening Record were nothing and everything like Runner Conley had always imagined them.

7. THE CURVE OF JOY
Thomas Peacock/Edward Shames, 10K+, Gen

Ed Shames was half asleep as the transport truck trundled along the pitted dirt road toward Camp de Châlons, kicking up mud from under its tires.

8. DUE WEST
Stevie Budd/Aleixs Rose & Patrick Brewer/David Rose, 4K+, Teen

“Are you sure about this?” David asked, folding another of Stevie’s shirts and adding it to the neat stack in the corner of the suitcase he had splayed open in front of him on the bed.

9. YOU CAN BE MEAN WHEN YOU LOOK THIS CLEAN
Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich, 1K+, Teen

“So,” Ian said, long after the second EmergEvac truck had rolled off into the night and he and Mickey had finished chain-smoking their way through the afternoon's frustrations.

10. SIMPLE AS A GLASS OF CHOCOLATE
Johnny Martin/Bull Randleman, 2K+, Explicit

“You know,” Bull said, holding his hands carefully out at either side of him where he stood in the middle of the room, patiently awaiting his turn to wash up, “when you asked if I wanted to come ‘round your billet for dessert, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

...I think my favorite out of all of them is the opener for Highway to the Edge. It does the best job of establishing character voice and conflict, imo, and I feel like the words "murder plot" are kind of an automatic hook to swindle someone into continuing to read at least a little further.

It has also become very clear to me, when weighing the first line from something like Curtain Call—which is a piece I wrote quite some time ago but only very recently posted—against the others, that I've gotten better at writing, in general. I still have a tendency to overwrite, but I think I've worked on my flow a lot and managed to hit a point where it's not necessarily a bad thing that I get florid at times.

I'm not sure that I have a pattern, per se, though I am pretty proud of my consistency when it comes to just flinging the reader straight into the action.

What are some of y'all's favorites of your own?