What's your first line?

I’ve got used to getting up this early now.

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Always start with early mornings.

The writers have all left for a trip to the city, though for what I don’t know, as they don’t tell me these things, to them I’m merely the building’s security guard, but at least now I can roam through their rooms to examine their typewriters, these instruments of torture that knock my head around day and night.

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Ugh.

"Fuck."

I kid you not.

He was nice to me so I indulged him.

Waiting for a fight is the worst part.

"The first time Imogene went to a funeral was on accident. "

"He was sitting right next to me and he kept sniffing up the mucus that kept trying to trickle out of his nose. "

I typed the first thing that came into my head at midnight on the 1st. It doesn't get any better from there.

"I want to be bad. I can't wait to learn to be bad."

Theory: make the reader want to know what's coming.

"It was cold, everything was dark and I felt like I was floating sitting there without breathing."

Hey this is fun!!

Raziel watched as she walked away from her friends to another section of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral.

"The year was 1979."

Simple and sweet?

"I was sitting in a clean, white room."

(I think it might be a Hemingway reference.)

I'll play; part of this is learning to be less shy about my writing, eh?

Years had passed since that phone call.

Oh, so banal -- beginning was the hardest part, and after that the words began flowing, and it got better surprisingly quickly. So maybe I have a bit of affection for that simple opening line. I'll still gladly rework it in December. :)

“Stay a little longer, Kira,” Helene said, lifting the hotel-starched white sheet to expose her breasts.

"I'm not the kind of person who would be in a place like this at a time like this, but I can't seem to make it happen any other way so I leave the process alone."

now that i see it written out all alone like that, i'm worried it might be a little cliche.
oh well. i'll save that for EdMo

Sometimes, it wasn’t so difficult to wake up at five in the morning, especially when two golden retrievers climb up on top of your chest.

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I agree with whoever said that they always start with mornings. :D I kind of want to reword it, because I simply can't compare to all of you guys' sentences. Hah.

That last night I danced with her under star-caught trees, and the leaves swirled in a grey green ocean under our feet and whispered to us of the immeasurable sadness of love.

"The air inside the Thunderbird Club smelled of cheap mustard and expensive failure."

"The fuck is a doorbuster?"

Rebecca Stone would always remember those as her husband’s last words.

"Phil left home because his wife's chihuahua bitch bit him."

I should probably start with Abby, since I wouldn't have met Tamara at all if it wasn't for him.

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My character is just as befuddled about telling stories as I am, and after all this crazy business has happened, she's trying to trace it all back to where it started. And it started when she met her future husband, which happened to be her last night at work and the last night she recognized her life.

LOVE it!!!! That image is awesome!!

"It was raining the day we buried our mother."

I don't know if I like it, but what the hell, it's a rough draft, right?

I LOVE this one!!! You rawk!

Oh, Yummy!

It was a dark and stormy night.

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Really. My main character is walking back to her little house on the edge of town after coming home from her first year performing with the vegetarian lesbian circus, and she's walking home in a rainstorm.

Haha, I just realized I mistyped my first sentence. I can't believe I didn't notice until now! Here it is:

"I like waking up in the morning."

I actually meant to write "I like waking up early in the morning." But that's more interesting, lol. I certainly wouldn't like to not wake up in the morning.

By the way, how did you guys come up with your first sentences? Did you think about it before you started writing, or was it just the first random thing that came out when you sat down to write it? I was thinking about what I should start with before I started writing, but then I gave up on that and just went with freewriting, and that's what came to mind at the time.

"A lone blackbird wandered among the sands, leaving behind it a trail of splayed footprints."

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It was one of those "Start at midnight with no idea how I'm starting" beginnings. :D

I like to start with what seems like an unimportant detail, go to what seems like an entirely different story for the whole novel, and throughout the whole story build up until, at the very end, in the very last lines, I repost that first paragraph and the reader goes, "OH. ... OH, I GET IT!"

Acceleration due to gravity in a free-fall is thirty-two feet per second per second.

"Who ARE you?"

Might as well play the black pieces, right? Give THEM the first move!