A flashlight and a promise

The lead — like the title — should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Most writers agonize more over their opening sentences than anything else, including the vital closing sentences. Get it right at the beginning and readers are likely to stick with you, at least for a while. Screw it up and you're lost while still in the starting gate.

When I was a newspaper reporter, and later a columnist and an editorial writer, I struggled with that first sentence, wanting to get it just right. Even then the copy desk would often change it. Once you have the right lead — or lede, as newspaper professionals call it —the rest of the story will flow from there, for both the writer and the reader.

Shirley Jackson

Lately I've been reading a number of Shirley Jackson short stories — more on this next time — and I was struck by how quickly she could grab the reader's attention. She begins "The Beautiful Stranger" with this line, "What might be called the first intimation of strangeness occurred at the railroad station." Here's how she opens "The Little House": "I'll have to get some decent lights, was her first thought, and her second: and a dog or something, or at least a bird, anything alive." "A Visit" begins, "The house in itself was, even before anything had happened there, as lovely a thing as she had ever seen."

I think Jackson's opening lines nicely illustrate the two metaphors Roy Peter Clark uses in the opening lines of this blog post. A good lead is both a flashlight and a promise. It gives us a peek at what's in there, like shining a flashlight into a dark attic. It also makes a promise as to what's inside.

Jackson does both of these things not just with her opening lines but with individual phrases within those sentences. Consider the light and the promises conveyed by these phrases: "the first intimation of strangeness," "anything alive" and "even before anything had happened there." Don't they make you want to read more?

Few of us write the kinds of stories Shirley Jackson wrote, but Clark's advice holds whatever we we happen to be writing.