And yet more great leads

I have a few more favorite leads I thought I’d post. Some of them are the kind that make you feel something terrible is coming, but others promise something different - fun, for instance. The trick is that whatever you promise in your lead (suspense, humour, romance, an engaging quest), you deliver in the rest of the book.

As you read each one, pretend you’ve never read the books and ask yourself what questions or expectations the various leads brings to your mind.

“At CBA Television News headquarters in New York, the initial report of a stricken Airbus A300, on fire and approaching Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, came only minutes before the network’s first feed of the National Evening News.” Arthur Hailey, The Evening News

“This is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and his two sisters were Kings and Queens under him. In those days, far south in Calormen on a little creek of the sea, there lived a poor fisherman called Arsheesh, and with him there lived a boy who called him Father.” C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Sunday morning Clarence Bunsen stepped into the shower and turned on the water–which was cold, but he’s Norwegian , he knows you have to take what you get–and stood until it got warm, and was reaching for the soap when he thought for sure he was having a heart attack.” Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom’s cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.” C. S. Lewis, Voyage to Venus

“It was growing late and still there was no sign of Engaine.” Thomas B. Costain, The Black Rose

“‘Tom!’ No Answer. ‘Tom!’ No answer. ‘What’s wrong with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!’”Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“Rob Nevin looked from his friend to the application form on the table between them and back to his friend again. ‘You’re kidding.’” Gordon Korman, No Coins Please

“A fire rages in Albion. A strange, hidden fire, dark-flamed, invisible to the eye. Seething and churning, it burns, gathering flames of darkness into its hot black heart. Unseen and unknown, it burns.” Stephen Lawhead, The Endless Knot

“The nice thing about pain is that it comes in all sorts of sizes - from the …Mini: ‘Excuse-me-you’re-stepping-on-my-bare-feet-with-your-baseball-cleats’ type of pain, to the Medium: ‘I-sure-wish-we-weren’t-going-through-this-red-light-with-that-semi-truck-coming-from-the-other-direction’ type of pain, to the Maxi-Econo-Sized: ‘What-does-this-bully-mean-when-he-says-he’s-going-to-give-me-some-free-dental-work?’ type of pain. Then of course, there’s the…Giant Industrial Strength version which I was about to experience…” Bill Myers, My Life as a Human Hockey Puck

“When my brother Tom began telling people in Adenville, Utah, that he had a great brain everybody laughed at him, including his own family. We all thought he was trying to play some kind of kid’s joke on us. But after he had used his great brain to swindle all the kids in town and make fools of most of the grownups nobody laughed at my brother any more.“ John D. Fitzgerald, The Great Brain at the Academy