First steps
Being able to change the world starts with learning to tell your story.
The most powerful part of a story is the first sentence. It must to grab the reader and pull them in, making them want more.
Following is a collection of first sentences from memoirs, which are true stories of the writer’s life…
God sent an icy wind, sharper than razor wire. It cut through the prison yard, stung the waiting visitors and sapped the guards; resolve -- nobody wanted any part of it.
Original first sentence in my memoir, but not used in the end
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.
The Glass Castle: a memoir by Jeannette Walls
The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California. Moments before, I’d removed my hiking boots and the left one had fallen into those trees, first catapulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it, then skittering across the gravelly trail and flying over the edge.
Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Twenty years is a long time, and yet as I think back to the night when I was admitted to the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital, it’s as vivid to me now as if it were yesterday.
Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free by Sheila Walsh.
When I was two months old, my parents, on orders from my paternal grandmother, took me to an herbalist in Da Nang and offered the old man gold bars to give me a concoction that would make me sleep forever. the unwinding of the miracle: a memoir of life, death & everything that comes
After by Julie Yip-Williams.
They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face.
The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz
