Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today, some of you are probably wrapping up work from National Novel Writing Month,

so we're going to talk about good first sentences.

And then, with the recent release of the movie Gladiator 2, we're going to talk about the

interesting origin of the word gladiator and other Roman words.

This first segment is by Camilla Nelson.

In Albert Camus, the plague from 1947, an epidemic spreads across Iran, a town on Africa's

north coast, as Joseph Grand attempts to write a novel. Grand dreams of writing a book that will cause

his publisher to leap up from his desk, the publishers in This World are Men, and gasp in wonder. But he can't get the

first sentence right. He worries at every detail, frets over meaning and rhythm. He arranges

it. There is no possibility of a second sentence. Without the first line, the novel is obstructed. Camus has a blackly comic sense of humor,

and so he causes Grant to go on scribbling through the night, parsing his phrases as the town

around him is laid waste. Grand continues to write even as he succumbs to the disease himself,

and after he's miraculously cured,

the local doctor having burnt the offending manuscript, Grant returns to his sentence once again.

He has, he tells the doctor, got the sentence by heart.

Like Hemingway, in search of the one true sentence he needed for a story to begin, or Flabert

in his excruciating search for Lemo Juste, Grand is convinced that a novel begins with its opening

line, and by following that line, the writer, no less than the reader, travels along a path to the novel's final destination.

Camus is keenly alive to the absurdity of Grant's conviction, the strange futility of his

endeavors, but there is perhaps a subtler irony in the fact that he was equally alive to the

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