What is the truest sentence you could write?
My novel starts with the line: “The first dead body I ever saw was my mother’s.”
The sentence is true, both for me and my main character. Whenever I re-read it, there is an inevitable echo - a connection to my own rather to be forgotten memory.
My book is fiction and Catrin, the protagonist, has her own story to tell. Yet, both our lives share that line, that clear emotional truth.
I wrote that sentence sitting in a community centre in baking-hot Córdoba, Andalucia, the city I’d moved to in an impetuous fit of both running away from and towards myself.
I was getting back into my abandoned novel. In the time since I’d written the first draft, I’d changed and so had my writing. What had started as a splurge onto the page, now became a series of questions to ask myself and the work - what is the story here that needs to be told?
On this particular day, I promised myself I wouldn’t write anything until I could set down on paper just one sentence that was emotionally true. The kind of truth that feels both heavy and full of possibility, like a brimming jug of water ready to spill over.
I already knew that the mother figure in my character’s life was absent. She had been unseen, ghost-like, in the first draft. Something was tugging at my intuition. It wasn’t enough that she was gone but could come back or be found - her absence had to be irreversible.
I was also so sure at this point of the landscape of the novel - a lonely marsh estuary with a dangerous tide - a fictional echo of the place I grew up. I wanted the marsh to be a character rather than just a place in the novel, so it seemed only right that it was active - taking one life and threatening to do it again.
I sat with all of this for a while, watching people buy bread and olives, spices, and bursting ripe fruit in the market below.
Then, as I dropped my writer’s bucket into that mysterious, sometimes murky sometimes iridescent, water of memory, experience and imagination, it came back with a line that was true for me.
In that moment of drawing these words from the well, an alchemy occurred. My character’s voice simply took over, marking the sentence as her own, and continued with the story.
Anyone who writes fiction will know the feeling - a voice that is not yours speaks from somewhere and you need to write down everything they say. Perhaps you are seeing what they are seeing, or perhaps you are an observer watching the scene - for me I always hear a voice, and experience the sensation of imagery flickering as the story moves through me.
That day, as I was trying to figure out where the story needed to begin, that one line opened a doorway into the emotional truth of the novel.
Catrin’s story of grief and trauma is different from mine, but here was a north star, a jumping off point, a thread to pull and unravel.
There is something about only allowing yourself to write one sentence that offers real power. The distillation demands attention. Truth.
It’s hard to explain that even though a story has an element of your truth in it, it’s still not about you. Like a song that samples an original track - sometimes the original goes unheard, sometimes there is a trace of it, but the new music is unique, yet couldn’t exist without the other layers.
That first line of my novel has remained exactly the same through three different drafts and various edits. For me it has been an anchor, a waypoint, a beam of light for seeing just a little bit further along the dimly lit path of story.
I wonder, what would be the truest sentence that you could write, right now? Without overthinking, so when it comes out it’s an impulse, a feeling, as much as pen moving over paper.
Then, where could it lead?
Write it. Look at it. Does it spark something in your work - can you hear one of your characters taking the words into their voice - if so, what’s next?
Or is it worthy of ten minutes journalling time? A mulling-over walk? A drawing? A phone-call?
What seed is planted with this sentence you’ve written, and what will grow from its truth?