What a First Line Is

The first line is incredibly important and also not important at all. If you take that exact same line, they shoot the white girl first, and you put it in quotation marks, what you're doing is adding a bunch of extra layers on top of it. The thing to understand, i think, about openings is that it is a series of bread crumbs. A lot of authors will make mistakes where there's no logical causal progression. They're just trying for, i'm going to holk the reader with this shocking thing, and then we don't go on from there.