Tips on writing the first line of your novel?

My boner faded today. Or maybe yesterday as well, I don't know.

>>21947688 (OP)

The first line isn't as important as you think. But the first paragraph is. It has to set the setting, tone, and some sense of a looming problem.

My boner failed today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I received a text message from the stupid thot's phone: "We are done. Getting my stuff tomorrow. Very sincerely yours." That doesn't mean anything. It might have been yesterday.

>>21947688 (OP)

Accept that it's going to be terrible. Don't write your magnum opusas your first novel. Consider everything you write as practice.

>>21947688 (OP)

Whats it going to be about?

Try the Raymond Roussel method:

>Roussel's most famous works are Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, both written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns. Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For example billard (billiard) and pillard (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus." For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table… must somehow reach the phrase, …les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard/letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer.

>>21947688 (OP)

REMEMBER: HOOK!

Some unacceptable Wikipedia editorialising in this article, by the way:

>Perhaps not surprisingly, Roussel was unpopular during his lifetime

>>21947688 (OP)

Read the plague by Camus

>>21947688 (OP)

Delete and retype some version of it 10 times in a row. Then do that for the rest of the novel too

Don't write a first line for your novel. Just start with the second sentence. Let there be an uncomfortable and threatening absence of a thing instead of a first sentence.

I get that reference.

>>21947688 (OP)

Assume you'll change it later and stop obsessing about it. Just get the damn thing started.
