You Have One Sentence to Hook Me

On one sunny storytime morning, I opened with a genuinely charming picture book that, unfortunately, began with the words, “Once upon a time…”

And I swear I watched half my audience mentally leave the room.

I liked this book. I really did. With a little added children’s-librarian magic (voices, questions, dramatic pauses, the usual tricks), I managed to win back maybe seventy percent of the room by the end. But still, an otherwise lovely picture book had stumbled before it had even gotten going.

Books, like people, rarely get a second chance to make a first impression. Readers decide astonishingly quickly whether to lean in or tune out, and that makes an opening line disproportionately important. In children’s books, the stakes are even higher. Anyone who has seriously attempted to write one knows that brevity does not make the form easier. It magnifies every choice. When you have only a few hundred words to work with, there is very little room for an opening that merely gets the job done.

A truly great opening line needs to do two things extraordinarily well: it needs to establish the story we are entering, and it needs to make us want the next sentence.

Which brings us back to “Once upon a time.” What, exactly, is so wrong with beginning a story with a classic fairy-tale opening?

For one thing, it is incredibly clichéd. If you picked up an adult mystery novel and it began with “It was a dark and stormy night,” you might give the author one more sentence to prove they were deliberately playing with your expectations before snapping the book closed in disappointment.

A strong cliché makes the reader think, Wait, haven’t I read this before? That is a terrible feeling for an author to instill. Readers like surprise. They like freshness. There is a reason the words novel and novelty are cousins. Life is short, time is precious, and no one wants to open a new book and immediately feel like they are living out the plot of Groundhog Day.

I would strongly encourage first-time authors to be suspicious of clichéd opening lines and opening concepts. Don’t automatically begin with your main character staring directly at the audience and announcing, “Hi, my name is Johnny, and I like…” Banish (at least temporarily) ye olde openings of “Once upon a time,” “In a land far away,” and “Once there was a…” And if your story begins with your character waking up, there had better be a compelling reason that this particular waking up is where the story truly begins.

But cliché is only one way an opening can fail. An opening can be completely original and still give the reader absolutely no reason to continue.

That is the larger problem. A weak opening effectively hands the reader a homework assignment of “Why am I reading this?” A strong opening creates the much more pleasurable question of “Cool! What happens next?”

A curious reader is an engaged reader. A curious young reader leans in, settles into the story, and waits for the grown-up holding the book to tell them what comes next. If, during a practice read of your manuscript, the first line does nothing to settle the room, or better yet, make a few faces turn toward you, I would seriously consider going back to the drawing board.

So how do you know whether your opening needs another attempt?

Start with one question: Why did I begin here?

Not, “Is this opening technically allowed?” Not, “Have other children’s books started this way?” Ask yourself why you chose this particular phrase, image, moment, or idea.

If the answer is, “I didn’t know how else to start,” or “Don’t all children’s books begin this way?” that is a strong indicator that you have the wrong opening.

Intention matters in writing, and it matters even more when your entire story may be only 350 words long. If you spend fifteen words on a boring opening, not only have you failed to excite the reader, you have also used roughly four percent of your available word count doing it.

That is expensive real estate.

The “why” behind an artistic choice can never be underestimated. In fact, a compelling enough “why” could save almost any one of the supposedly forbidden openings I just listed. A skilled author could absolutely begin with “Once upon a time” if those words were being used deliberately, to subvert a fairy-tale convention, create a joke, establish a narrator, or set up something unexpected.

The problem is not that certain combinations of words are cursed. The problem is making a choice because you had no better idea.

This is why I am less interested in giving writers a blacklist of forbidden opening lines than I am in asking them to understand what an opening is supposed to accomplish.

So let’s return to those two goals. Your opening line needs to establish the story and create curiosity.

Of the two, establishing the story is usually the more concrete place for a writer to begin. “Make the reader excited” is vague. Tone, character, setting, conflict, and premise are things you can actually point to on the page.

Consider Eric Carle’s opening to The Very Hungry Caterpillar:

“In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.”

It is quiet. Small. Contained. The book itself is similarly focused. Our caterpillar hero moves from object to object, eating his way through a very simple sequence. Beginning with a single egg on a single leaf immediately establishes that intimate scale.

But the egg also does something else. An egg promises change. Something is about to happen. Something is going to come out of that egg. Before the caterpillar has even appeared, the reader already has a reason to keep going.

Or think about Maurice Sendak’s opening to Where the Wild Things Are:

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another…”

Look at how much work that sentence does.

We know our main character without Max having to turn toward the audience and introduce himself. We know it is night, which immediately gives the story a slightly stranger, more mysterious atmosphere. We know Max makes mischief, which tells us something essential about his personality. He is not being introduced to us as a particularly obedient little boy.

And then there is the wolf suit.

Before the wild things themselves ever appear, Sendak has already planted the visual and thematic language of monsters.

That is an enormous amount of groundwork for one sentence.

Then there is Drew Daywalt’s The Day the Crayons Quit:

“One day in class, Duncan went to take out his crayons and found a stack of letters with his name on them.”

The sentence begins almost aggressively ordinarily. A child is in class. He reaches for his crayons. Nothing could be more normal.

And then… letters?

Why are there letters in the crayon box? Who wrote them? Why are they addressed to Duncan?

That little disruption transforms an ordinary classroom action into a question. The line makes the reader pause and think, Wait, what?

Perfect!

It also subtly tells us what kind of world we have entered. This is going to be a story in which ordinary objects may not behave according to the normal rules of reality.

That is the work a good opening can do. If your own opening is not doing enough yet, there are several places you can look for a stronger starting point.

You can begin with a character. Introducing your main character is perfectly fine. You just do not have to make them walk onstage with the accompanying text functioning as a name tag.

Mo Willems does something much more playful in Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The book opens with the bus driver, who quickly establishes both the situation and the pigeon who will become our actual focus. Before the story has properly begun, a presumably respectable public servant is asking the reader to make sure a bird does not get behind the wheel of a bus.

That absurdity tells us nearly everything we need to know.

We know what the central conflict is. We know who the troublemaker will be. And we know immediately that this story intends to play with us.

You can also begin with place. Ludwig Bemelmans opens Madeline with:

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.”

Immediately, we are somewhere specific. Paris. An old house. Twelve little girls arranged in two perfect rows.

The setting creates atmosphere, but the description of those orderly little girls also creates a question. Why are they always in two straight lines? And, once Madeline emerges as the little girl who does not quite fit that pattern, the opening becomes even more useful. It has established the order so that we can notice the exception.

You can begin with time, too. “Once upon a time” may be tired, but time itself is an enormously useful storytelling tool.

Consider another Mo Willems book, Knuffle Bunny:

“Not so long ago, before she could even speak words, Trixie went on an errand with her daddy.”

Now we know that this story happened in the past, but not some vague fairy-tale past. It happened before something. And that something was Trixie’s ability to speak.

That one detail immediately tells us that Trixie is very young, and it quietly establishes one of the most important conditions of the story. If something goes wrong, she cannot simply explain it.

So if your manuscript currently begins with some version of “Once upon a time,” try asking yourself a more interesting question. A time before what?

Before the town had a dragon? Before Maya learned how to whistle? Before Grandpa forgot where he had hidden the moon?

Specificity creates possibility and can easily fold in fantasy.

And finally, there is my favorite kind of picture-book opening, which I like to call the In-Your-Face Statement.

These openings simply announce the premise. No easing in. No throat-clearing. Here is the strange thing. Deal with it.

B. J. Novak does this beautifully in The Book with No Pictures:

“This is a book with no pictures.”

That is it. Plain. Direct. Almost boring. Except, of course, it is the title premise of an illustrated-format children’s book announcing that it contains no pictures at all.

The entire joke, structure, and performance of the book grows out of that statement. By telling the reader exactly what makes this book unusual, Novak perfectly positions everything that follows.

And that is ultimately what you are looking for in an opening line.

A good opening line is not necessarily the funniest sentence. It’s not the prettiest sentence. Or a sentence no other human being could possibly have imagined before you. You are looking for the sentence that opens the door to this particular story.

It should tell us, somehow, what kind of experience we are stepping into. And then it should leave just enough unanswered that we willingly take another step.

Because when you read to children, you can actually see the moment an opening works. They stop shifting around. They look up. They lean in. And somewhere behind those very serious little faces is the question every storyteller is hoping to create. “What happens next?”

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Note: The images in this article were created by me in Canva by collaging and arranging existing artwork. No images were generated using artificial intelligence.