The Delete-Your-First-Sentence Rule: Why Great Openers Are Written in Draft Two
Honestly, anyone who has written a few pages knows this experience: you write the first sentence, a paragraph takes shape behind it, and two hours later there is a text on the table that smells good from somewhere in the middle. The problem is exactly that first sentence, which sits like a stone in the doorway and no one dares to move it. Experienced writers, instead of wrestling with this stone, do something simpler: they delete the sentence and start from the second paragraph. This small move has an informal name in writing workshops: “the rule of deleting the first sentence.”
The first sentence is often not writing; it’s warming up
When you sit down at the desk, your mind still doesn’t know what it wants to say. So it writes the first sentence as an experiment: a safe description of the weather, a tidy introduction to a character, or a general statement about life. After two paragraphs, the hand is warmed up and the text finds its real path. In other words, the first sentence was written by someone who had not yet discovered the subject.
Anne Lamott says this explicitly in Bird by Bird: we all write a bad first draft and have to let it be bad so that something can get onto the page. The first sentences are usually the worst part of that bad draft, because they were written earliest of all.
Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open. — Stephen King, On Writing
In the same book, King explains that you write the first draft for yourself, to understand what your story is; the second draft is for the reader. The opening sentence, properly understood, belongs to the reader’s version, not the writer’s version.
Signs that the first sentence should be cut
Blind deletion is of no use; you have to be able to tell which sentence is doing the warming-up and which one actually opens the door. Here are a few recurring patterns:
| Marker in the first sentence | What it reveals | A better alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Description of weather and scenery | It’s still unclear where the story begins | The first moment of tension or decision |
| Full character résumé: name, age, occupation | Fear of losing the reader | An action or line of dialogue that reveals the character |
| A philosophical, general statement | The text has not yet found its subject | Concrete, visible details |
| An explanation about writing itself | Metadiscourse instead of narrative | A direct entry into the scene |
Elmore Leonard says plainly in his famous list of rules: don’t open a book with the weather. This rule is of the same kind; describing the weather is the first thing a writer chooses in order to avoid making a decision.
What the second draft changes
In the second draft you have two things you didn’t have in the first: the story’s ending and its tone. When you know the outcome, the first sentence is no longer a guess; it is a tool that pushes the reader along a specific path. That same sentence can be aimed toward the ending.
At this stage, the writer does the simplest thing possible: they move the first paragraph several lines down, to the place where the text is still warming up. In his notes, Kafka writes about the difficulty of arriving at the right beginning and sets aside numerous versions of the opening of “The Metamorphosis” until that calm, unassuming sentence remains: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning...” — a sentence with no description of the weather that strikes directly at the central reality. Hemingway also rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms dozens of times; a culture of revision at the sentence level is not an exception but a professional habit.
Real examples and their lessons
- Joan Didion says in “Why I Write” that she writes to find out what she thinks. If writing is a tool of discovery, then the first sentence was necessarily written before the discovery.
- Stephen King usually cuts about ten percent of the text when revising; a large part of that reduction is in the opening warm-ups.
- Anton Chekhov stressed in his letters to young writers that beginnings and endings should be kept short, because that is where the writer tends to explain instead of show.
- Vladimir Nabokov wrote his text on small cards and insistently rearranged them; for him, no sentence, including the first, had a fixed place.
What these examples share is one thing: none of them treated the first sentence as sacred. The first sentence was a choice, not a commitment.
How to apply this rule to your own writing
- Leave a time gap. Don’t make a decision immediately after writing; a day later, read the text from the second paragraph and see whether anything is missing.
- Go to the first tension. Place the first sentence where the first decision, the first risk, or the first question takes shape.
- Write three different options. One sentence with an image, one sentence with dialogue, one sentence with a bold claim. Then choose one; comparison makes judgment easier.
- Apply the “only about me” test. If the first sentence serves only the writer’s purpose and gives the reader no information, delete it.
- Don’t throw away the deleted part. Keep it in a separate file; some of those sentences have a good place in the middle of the text.
Conclusion
The rule of deleting the first sentence is not a sacred literary commandment; it is a practical habit for not confusing the first draft with the final draft. The first sentence we use to warm up is often the most honest sentence in the text, and precisely for that reason it is not the best place to begin; the reader does not need to see us warming up. Just try this small experiment once: remove the first paragraph and start with the second. If the text becomes stronger, you have found the rule; if not, put the first sentence back and this time keep it with more confidence.
