On the First Line

There's a particular kind of silence that lives at the top of a blank page. It's heavier than other silences. Anyone who has tried to write a song knows it. The moment after you put your fingers on the strings, after you open the notebook, and before anything has happened yet. Most unwritten songs die in that silence.

For a long time I thought the first line had to be brilliant. I thought it had to do all the things a song's first line is supposed to do - set the scene, hook the ear, hint at what's coming, sound effortless, sound new and... AMAZING. I would sit there waiting for it... and wait... and wait. The silence would get heavier. I would put the guitar down and go for a walk.

Here is what I think now. The first line does not have to be brilliant. It does not even have to stay. It only has to be a door.

A door, not a foundation

A foundation has to hold up the whole building. A door only has to open. The very first line you write in a song is not load-bearing, it's a way in. Once you're inside, you can wander the room, find what's there, and come back later to fix the threshold. Almost every song I've finished has a different first line than the one I started with. Some of them have a different first verse.

The brilliant first lines you remember from other people's songs were almost certainly not the first thing those writers put down. They came later, after the writer found out what the song was about. You can't write the perfect opening to a story you haven't read yet.

The brilliant first line is the last one you write, not the first.

How to crack a door

When the silence at the top of the page is too heavy, I have three doors I keep in my pocket. Each is a way to start a line that doesn't matter if it stays.

The weather door

Begin with what's outside: rain, heat, snow, a particular hour of the evening. "The rain was the cheap kind, falling sideways." It gives the song an immediate place and an immediate temperature. Weather is a generous opener because it asks nothing of you - you don't have to decide who is speaking yet, or to whom.

The middle-of-something door

Start as if the song has already been going on. "You said that part twice." "By Wednesday I'd stopped counting." The reader steps into a scene already in motion, and you, the writer, are forced to figure out what that scene is. That figuring-out is the song.

The object door

Name one specific thing. A glass on a table. A folded receipt. A second toothbrush. Concrete objects are spring-loaded with story. Pick the right one and the rest of the song will pull itself out of it. SenseSpark is good for this when nothing obvious is in the room; it'll hand you a sensory image to start from when your own pockets are empty.

Trust the smallest version

The smallest viable first line is enough. Five words. Three, sometimes. You are not trying to write a Pulitzer-grade opening sentence; you are trying to start the next thing. Once the next thing exists, the song has weight, and the weight pulls more lines into being. That is the whole trick. The first line is a door; you do not need to admire it; you need only to pass through it.

When the song is finished, come back and look at the door. Sometimes you'll find it was perfect all along (HA). Those are the lucky days. Most days, you'll see that what you really wanted to open with is the line from halfway through verse two, the one that startled you when you wrote it. Move it to the top. Throw the old door away. Nobody will know.