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It’s never made clear what kind of vermin poor Gregor has turned into, but it’s popularly interpreted as a giant insect of some kind. The Metamorphosis was written in German, so this is in translation “monstrous vermin” is a literal translation of “ ungeheures Ungeziefer”. This lulls us into believing that the story could really happen, and in doing so, we feel sympathy with Gregor right from the start. The genius of this opening line is that it’s unsettling and shocking, but it’s written in such an essentially run-of-the-mill way that the reader feels that this is a perfectly ordinary predicament that could befall anyone. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” – The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (1915) The ‘monstrous vermin’ is often interpreted as a beetle. A bad opening line can be the downfall of a writer, too – thanks to his famously terrible opening to Paul Clifford, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’, Edward Bulwer-Lytton now has a fiction contest for terrible first lines named after him! Thankfully, other writers have had more success here are some of our favourites and what makes them so memorable. It takes great skill to craft the perfect opening to a novel, and doing so is one of the hallmarks of a brilliant writer. And it’s the line that, if done well, has the potential to be the one that everyone remembers and quotes.

It’s the line that must capture the reader’s interest so that they continue to read (or buy the book having read the opening line). It’s the line that sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

One of the hardest things on the long list of ‘hard things a novelist has to do’ is writing the opening line.