First Lines Meme
Here's an always-fun meme that seems to be cropping up again. (I'm stealing it from aralias this time, complete with an additional suggestion.)
List the first lines of your last twenty stories. See if you find any patterns.
I've skipped all the drabbles and the little things I've written in my recent bouts of ficlet-request writing. And, excluding those, I don't think I've actually written 20 stories since the last time I did this meme, because about half of these look very familiar. Well, OK, obviously they're familiar, because I wrote them, but you know what I mean. I hope. Anyway, from most recent to least:
1. "Well," said Sarah Jane, "this is the last of them."
2. Tentatively, Jenna touches one of the creature's arms.
3. The Doctor was having a relaxing day.
4. Among the Jaffa, some things are considered absolutes: faith, duty, obedience.
5. The vampire's name was Herman.
6. The Liberator teleport bay shimmered and faded around Vila for what he suddenly realized would be the very last time, and before he could change his mind again, he found himself standing in the main computer room on Station XK-72.
7. "Nyssa!" the Doctor called from the next room over, his cheerful voice echoing loudly in the museum's vast marble interior.
8. Sex is wonderful.
9. It works.
10. The cage is so small.
11. "My own suspicion," said the great naturalist J.B.S. Haldane, "is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
12. It was possible, Jenny thought as she ran through the flaming wreckage of the Overlord's fortress, that she'd saved this particular planet a little too enthusiastically.
13. Daniel Jackson peered at the weathered inscription, muttering to himself.
14. Jack paused outside the door and checked the sensor on his wrist device again.
15. The change in him has been gradual, but a good Peacekeeper is aware of his environment, always, and knows that understanding the tactical situation inside one's own skull is as important as acquiring sound intelligence on the outside world.
16. War has become the Doctor's life.
17. He sometimes used to wonder, back in the last cosmic cycle, why every entity left over from the beginning of the universe appeared to be evil.
18. When she was young, Rita knew a man called the Doctor.
19. Tegan let out a yell, clutched at the nearest object on her bedroom shelf -- a clay figurine, souvenir of some planet or other -- and threw it hard against the wall.
20. He doesn't know exactly what to expect, but part of him can't help imagining it as an invasion, as something slimy and alien crawling into his body and violating his mind.
I'm really not sure about patterns, other than noticing that I'm perhaps a little too fond of starting stories with sentences that contain some conjugation of the word "is." We've got a wide range of sentence styles here, from the slightly rambly to the extremely succinct, and from the (perhaps deceptively) action-packed to the reflectively philosophical. I must say, given the fact that I often find first sentences a bit problematic, I rather like this particular batch. On the whole, they do kind of sound like they're potentially leading into something interesting, don't you think?
I'm still especially fond of #12. And #8, viewed out of context like that, is making me chuckle. Heh. Really, that wasn't even a smutty story.
And if anybody is bored and would like to play the "write something starting with one of these first lines" game, by all means, go ahead. That's always entertaining.
List the first lines of your last twenty stories. See if you find any patterns.
I've skipped all the drabbles and the little things I've written in my recent bouts of ficlet-request writing. And, excluding those, I don't think I've actually written 20 stories since the last time I did this meme, because about half of these look very familiar. Well, OK, obviously they're familiar, because I wrote them, but you know what I mean. I hope. Anyway, from most recent to least:
1. "Well," said Sarah Jane, "this is the last of them."
2. Tentatively, Jenna touches one of the creature's arms.
3. The Doctor was having a relaxing day.
4. Among the Jaffa, some things are considered absolutes: faith, duty, obedience.
5. The vampire's name was Herman.
6. The Liberator teleport bay shimmered and faded around Vila for what he suddenly realized would be the very last time, and before he could change his mind again, he found himself standing in the main computer room on Station XK-72.
7. "Nyssa!" the Doctor called from the next room over, his cheerful voice echoing loudly in the museum's vast marble interior.
8. Sex is wonderful.
9. It works.
10. The cage is so small.
11. "My own suspicion," said the great naturalist J.B.S. Haldane, "is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
12. It was possible, Jenny thought as she ran through the flaming wreckage of the Overlord's fortress, that she'd saved this particular planet a little too enthusiastically.
13. Daniel Jackson peered at the weathered inscription, muttering to himself.
14. Jack paused outside the door and checked the sensor on his wrist device again.
15. The change in him has been gradual, but a good Peacekeeper is aware of his environment, always, and knows that understanding the tactical situation inside one's own skull is as important as acquiring sound intelligence on the outside world.
16. War has become the Doctor's life.
17. He sometimes used to wonder, back in the last cosmic cycle, why every entity left over from the beginning of the universe appeared to be evil.
18. When she was young, Rita knew a man called the Doctor.
19. Tegan let out a yell, clutched at the nearest object on her bedroom shelf -- a clay figurine, souvenir of some planet or other -- and threw it hard against the wall.
20. He doesn't know exactly what to expect, but part of him can't help imagining it as an invasion, as something slimy and alien crawling into his body and violating his mind.
I'm really not sure about patterns, other than noticing that I'm perhaps a little too fond of starting stories with sentences that contain some conjugation of the word "is." We've got a wide range of sentence styles here, from the slightly rambly to the extremely succinct, and from the (perhaps deceptively) action-packed to the reflectively philosophical. I must say, given the fact that I often find first sentences a bit problematic, I rather like this particular batch. On the whole, they do kind of sound like they're potentially leading into something interesting, don't you think?
I'm still especially fond of #12. And #8, viewed out of context like that, is making me chuckle. Heh. Really, that wasn't even a smutty story.
And if anybody is bored and would like to play the "write something starting with one of these first lines" game, by all means, go ahead. That's always entertaining.