First Line Writing Prompts

All first line prompts

Every first line prompt in the set — tapUse this to load one into the generator above.

• The last house on Vane Street had a mailbox that filled itself every night, and none of the letters had ever been mailed.Use this
• My grandmother left me three things in her will: a locked room, a key that fit nothing, and a warning written in a language she never spoke while alive.Use this
• By the time I noticed the whole town was pretending it was Tuesday, it had been Tuesday for eleven days.Use this
• The interview was going well until they asked me to describe my death, and I realized they had my file open to a page I had never written.Use this
• Every mirror in the hotel had been turned to face the wall, and the concierge smiled and said it was for my comfort.Use this
• The dog came back on the fourth day, which would have been a miracle if we had actually owned a dog.Use this
• On the morning I turned forty, a boy who looked exactly like me at nine knocked on my door and asked if he could have his life back.Use this
• There is a rule in our family that you never answer the phone between three and four in the morning, and last night I finally learned why.Use this
• The moving truck was already half full when I got home from work, and the men loading it insisted they had the right address for the right family, and the family was not mine.Use this
• She said she loved me in a way that made it sound like an apology, and then she asked how much I remembered about the flood.Use this
• The map they handed me at the border was blank except for a single red dot labeled you were here.Use this
• For thirty years the lighthouse had been automated, so the light in the window that night belonged to someone, and I was the only person on the island.Use this
• My father taught me to swim by throwing me in the lake, and forty years later, at his funeral, the lake was where they told me to look for him.Use this
• The bakery on the corner had a sign in the window that read closed until you are ready, and it had said that every day I had ever walked past it.Use this
• I found my own handwriting in a diary I had never kept, describing a childhood that was better than the one I remembered.Use this
• The wedding photographer captured everything perfectly except the groom, who did not appear in a single frame.Use this
• When the power went out across the entire coast, only my apartment stayed lit, and the neighbors began to gather quietly on the lawn below my window.Use this
• The instructions for assembling the crib were forty pages long, written by hand, and step thirty-one simply said do not let it hear you.Use this
• Nobody in the office would tell me what happened to the person who used to sit in my chair, but they all flinched when I put my coffee where the ring stain already was.Use this
• The letter was postmarked next Thursday, and the handwriting was mine, and it began by telling me not to open it.Use this
• I inherited a bookstore where every book was blank until someone truly needed to read it.Use this
• The recording of my mother's voice on the answering machine had started saying things she never said, always in the past tense, always about me.Use this
• We buried my brother on a Sunday, and on Monday his car was in the driveway with the engine warm.Use this
• The new tenant upstairs walked with a limp exactly like mine, coughed exactly like mine, and left the building only when I did.Use this
• The therapist wrote down everything I said, and when I finally read the notes upside down, they were a transcript of a conversation we had not had yet.Use this