Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club 
begins like this:
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, “We really won’t die.”
Over the top? Yes. Gun in the opening sentence? Come on. Spare me. So overdone. But the novel starts to work in the third paragraph:
With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun. Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there’s the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast. To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.
The narrative has stopped screaming, “Hook the reader on page one.” This is interesting. The gun that began as a gimmick now has a tongue on its silencer holes. Palahniuk has taken the reader to a new place. I’m intrigued. By page two, I’m in the moment with these characters and yes, I’m hooked.
What has hooked me? The details. In chapter one it’s guns and the nuances of mixing sawdust and chemicals into explosives. In chapter two it’s narrowly-focused support groups. Chapter three, movie projector reels, all from the perspective of a protagonist with insomnia. It’s intense. Disjointed. Engaging. No hand-holding here. Instead, it’s my job to keep up, and I cannot turn the pages fast enough. In scene after scene, I latch onto details that ground me in an otherwise chaotic narrative. I’ve suspended disbelief and clicked the seat belt. Now I’m leaning forward, gripping the safety bar, not feeling safe at all. I taste metal, smell tarmac exhaust, and hear the crunch of buttered popcorn on the theater floor.
In my own writing these days, I’ve made the switch from soul-searching and re-evaluating a novel that my agent nixed to revisions—major revisions. I don’t need a gun in the first sentence to wake up my story, but I need details. I’ve figured out what my protagonist wants. Now can I succeed in grounding readers so they’ll suspend disbelief and come along for the ride? If Palahniuk can do it, so can I.
You can totally do it, Anne. Thanks for sharing the details from Fight Club, and reminding me that sometimes we do our best learning when we’re reading someone else’s work.
Absolutely! I’ve learned so much from others’ books. Now I’m reading Richard Peck, and his writing is incredibly funny and tightly written — worlds different from FIGHT CLUB. Each works in its own stye, for its own audience.