{"id":1418057,"date":"2022-03-09T10:38:34","date_gmt":"2022-03-09T15:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sparknotes.com\/blog\/?p=1418057"},"modified":"2022-03-09T10:38:36","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T15:38:36","slug":"rejected-first-drafts-of-famous-opening-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/blog\/rejected-first-drafts-of-famous-opening-lines\/","title":{"rendered":"Rejected First Drafts of Famous Opening Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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No one has ever written anything good on the first go. Not Jane Austen, not Ernest Hemingway, and certainly not me in college. But do you think that ever stopped me from submitting a terrible essay with no clear thesis, a middling conclusion, and only two minutes to go before the deadline? Absolutely not. It should have stopped me, but it didn’t even slow me down. My grades suffered for it. One time I cried during office hours. Okay, twice. Anyway!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a reason rough drafts exist, and it’s because your first instinct isn’t always your best. You’ll write something down, think it’s amazing, and come back to it later only to think, \u201cDid a drunken baboon write this? Did someone close their eyes and just bang their hands on the keyboard for a while and then hit \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsave’?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s happened to all of us. Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, and the like are no exception. Here are some of the rough drafts they almost definitely came up with before eventually settling on the opening lines with which we’re all familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCall me Ishmael David Henry William Jones the Third. Except maybe that’s a bit much. You know what? I take it back. Call me Ishmael or don’t call me at all.\u201d
\u2014Herman Melville, Moby Dick<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I mean, man, it was just\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 the times<\/em>, you know? Good. Bad. The times, we sure had \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcem. We had them whether they were good or<\/em> bad.\u201d
\u2014Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcEat your vegetables,’ he always used to tell me. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDo the dishes. Never judge people.’ Anyway, let’s talk about that third one.\u201d
\u2014F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a dark, stormy, mildly humid night.\u201d
\u2014Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. The thing is, he used to be a normal human. That’s why it was weird when he woke up and he wasn’t one.\u201d
\u2014Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, or at least a mistress he can squirrel away in a seaside cottage that he occasionally visits ‘for his health’.\u201d
\u2014Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish, or a shark, or a squid, or a lobster, or whatever else lives at the bottom of the ocean that scientists haven’t had the heart to tell us about.\u201d
\u2014Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMother died today. Or maybe yesterday, or the day before that, or sometime the previous Wednesday; I can’t be sure. The fact remains that she’s extremely dead.\u201d
\u2014Albert Camus, The Stranger<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Pigs were flying. Hell had frozen over. Every day was Tuesday, and socks didn’t exist. Look, things were weird. You get what I’m saying.\u201d
\u2014George Orwell, 1984<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one has ever written anything good on the first go. Not Jane Austen, not Ernest Hemingway, and certainly not me in college. But do you think that ever stopped me from submitting a terrible continue reading<\/span>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[628,3329,25017,756,694,17301],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418057"}],"collection":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1418057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443544,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418057\/revisions\/1443544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1418057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1418057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1418057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}