Spunk & Bite Read online

  We say the opening promise has to be delivered in a few sentences; how few depends mainly on the length of the work. Readers of a newspaper or magazine piece, already stimulated by headlines, subheads, and graphic enticements, expect a fast, focused entry—maybe three or four sentences at most: “Norman Mailer’s new book bears all the signs—all the watermarks, all the heraldry—of a writer faced with an alimony bill of $500,000.” (Martin Amis, The Observer, 1982) Readers may be more patient with book and chapter openings, but within a half page or so they should be convinced that soul or synapse will be jostled at some point down the line.

  Sometimes a slow, percolating beginning seems the only way to launch a complex piece; but slow is hazardous in an age of manic impatience. Prolonged openings are mainly an indulgence of brand-name authors. However, they sometimes work as a sampling of things to come, like a musical overture, delivering both promise and stimulation. For example, Mark Twain’s opening to Life on the Mississippi is a 238-word paragraph that winds its way through the river’s awesome statistics, promising a larger-than-life tale while making the reader a little smarter. And when Tom Wolfe opens his Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by repeating the word hernia fifty-seven times to mimic the singsong of a Vegas craps dealer, readers are already having a laugh and anticipating more.

  A CERTAIN SOMETHING

  Speaking of hernia, in my life as an editor I hefted no few truckloads of nonfiction submissions; and like other editors who have seen every earnest and devious attempt to grab attention in an opening, I tended to appreciate those efforts that seemed effortless and yet had something that left a bite mark. What can that something be? One fetching quality is sincerity: a sense that what follows the opening will come from the heart—whether the heart be desolate or overflowing. It worked long ago for St. Augustine, who in the opening of Book III of The Confessions revealed the conflicted state of his passions:

  I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. . . . I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls. (ca. 400)

  It is said that Thomas Paine, marching in retreat with George Washington’s troops in 1776, scrawled the opening words to American Crisis using the head of a drum as a desk. They still resound like a drumbeat:

  These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. (1776)

  CONTEXT COUNTS

  Opening words can release a torrent of feelings when an audience, owing to cultural or historical events, is poised to react to them. The writer’s job is to find expression for readers’ pent-up sensibilities. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique touched tens of millions with its opening:

  The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. . . . the silent question—“Is this all?” (1963)

  In Roots, Alex Haley shared his triumphant genealogical odyssey with multitudes of other African-Americans who felt detached from their ancestral histories. The book’s vigorous opening brought his triumph to life:

  Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte. Forcing forth from Binta’s strong young body, he was as black as she was, flecked and slippery with Binta’s blood, and he was bawling. (1976)

  TYPES OF—HOW YOU SAY?—“LEADS”

  Journalists call the opening lines of their stories “leads” (pronounced leeds, sometimes spelled ledes), a term so newsroomy it sports a fedora and sleeve garters. We might as well start using it here—even applying it, as journalists do, to openings in literature.

  Every so often someone tries to catalog all the many types of leads. Editor Robert L. Baker once defined seventeen types, including the standard news summary (which answers the questions “who?”, “what?”, “where?”, and “when?”) and the “hybrid,” or mix of types. Actually, inventive writers have devised dozens of approaches, but much of their work begins with one of six types of openings identified by Baker:

  • someone’s remark—a quotation;

  • an intriguing or amusing question;

  • a striking or startling statement;

  • descriptive stage-setting;

  • storytelling narrative; or

  • a one-line attention getter called a “capsule.”

  Using the capsule lead followed by taut narratives in The Miami Herald, crime reporter and mystery writer Edna Buchanan created such classic openings as this one from 1985:

  Gary Robinson died hungry.

  He wanted fried chicken, the three-piece box for $2.19.

  The story goes on to reveal how the protagonist pushes his way through the line at a fast-food joint, punches the counter girl because the supply of chicken has run out, and is shot three times by a security guard.

  The stage-setter is a slower type of lead. Tipped off to a story’s subject by headlines or titles, readers know the staging will be relevant and they enjoy the drama—but only for a few paragraphs before they start stamping for action. To set the stage for their Pulitzer Prize–winning series on gene therapy, the Chicago Tribune’s Jeff Lyon and Peter Gomer panned the bedroom of a young girl suffering from an immune system deficiency:

  Entering Allison Ashcraft’s bedroom you get the feeling that you are being watched. Stuffed animals are everywhere. More than 200 of them fix visitors with a glassy stare from all corners of the room. Girlish excess? No, good parental psychology. Each button-eyed, felt-tongued rabbit, tiger, and bear represents a time in the last five years that doctors have had to draw Allison’s blood. (1986)

  Sports writers like to set stages to the point of cliché, perhaps ever since 1924, when Notre Dame beat Army’s football team and Grantland Rice immortalized four players in this lead for the New York Herald-Tribune:

  Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.

  In the same tradition but without cliché, John Updike began his New Yorker adieu to Ted Williams with this stage-setter:

  Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ball park. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned, peeping-type Easter egg. (The New Yorker, 1960)

  The good narrative lead gets right to the action—setting the stage, if necessary, as it goes along. If vicarious thrills are to come, they can start coming in the lead itself:

  We were all strapped into the seats of the Chinook, fifty of us, and something was hitting it from the outside with an enormous hammer . . . making it dip and turn in a horrible out-of-control motion that took me in the stomach.

  (—Michael Herr, “Illumination Rounds,” Dispatches, 1977)

  STRIKING TO THE QUICK

  The striking-statement type of lead can pierce even the thickest armor of reader resistance. Strike directly at a reader’s fears, sacred cows, or funny bone, and you’ll get attention.

  Opening a chapter of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson went for the fear membrane:

  For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. (1962)

  Among author William Zinsser’s favorite leads is one of his own, the droll but unsettling opening to “Block that Chicken-furter,” from a 1969 issue of Life magazine: “I’ve often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I know and I wish I didn’t.”


  Whatever its slant, the striking statement should be concise and, ideally, involve the reader. In 1990, Diane Ackerman drew readers into the “Vision” chapter of A Natural History of the Senses with this twist on self-image: “Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret: You are looking into a predator’s eyes.” Here, Ackerman uses the “direct” (or second-person) approach to engage the reader’s self-interest. A first-person approach can be equally engaging, provided that nothing distracts the reader from identifying with the “I” character. “I come to celebrate celery,” wrote Dorothy Kallins as her lead to “Crunch” (Saveur, 2001)—and we can already taste what’s coming.

  * * *

  OVERWORKED OPENINGS

  “A good lead overcomes the inertia that sits on a reader’s mind like a lump of clay.” This is an example of the “quotation lead”—and one that makes a good point. But as a type of lead, the quotation is becoming shopworn—thanks partly to a million speech openings.

  In profiles and interviews, however, where the subject’s words are paramount and usually fresh, the quotation still rules:

  “A good thread,” said the Mahatma, “is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”

  With the fingers of one hand he maintained the proper delicate tension on the cotton thread he was spinning. With the other hand he turned the small, flat charkha—spinning wheel—at his side on the white mattress. (—Price Day, Baltimore Sun, 1948)

  Just as the quotation lead worked in this Pulitzer Prize-winning interview with Gandhi, it can work in today’s profiles if brief and pointed.

  But some devices that once put a literary gloss on works of nonfiction are today seeming rather weather-beaten. Gandhi spinning thread, for example, is one of those detailed close-ups meant to contrast with earthshaking events—in this case with rioting and social upheaval in India. Related clichés include the “calm before the storm” opening, or what William Zinsser once called “the button-nosed-boy” approach: the paper boy completing his route before the sleepy town explodes.

  Don’t shy away from literary devices in your leads—or even from cinematic pans and zooms. But try to resist clichéd types as rigorously as you avoid long lists, asides, and complicated background details. Be original, and watch that lump of clay melt away.

  * * *

  THE PERSONAL TOUCH

  In first-person narratives—memoirs, autobiographies, accounts of journeys—many of the best openings are invitational rather than startling. They imply, “Here is a person you want to spend time with.” Few readers want to hang with a bloviating show-off; but openings that suggest some exceptional personality trait of the narrator promise stimulating company. Naturally, this suggestion must be true to the character of the whole work.

  Readers love setting off on physical or spiritual journeys with keen-eyed companions. Paul Theroux portrays himself as an intolerant loner in his travel adventures, yet readers want to come along to share his observations, both mean-spirited and soulful. In his opening to The Great Railway Bazaar, he hints that the soulful side is on board:

  Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. (1975)

  In your own first-person openings, you may want to introduce a touch of your wit or special savvy; your literary flair, nuttiness, perceptiveness—even wickedness. Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s conversational opener is legend: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” Your opening, too, can radio a signal to kindred souls.

  What do you think drew a million-plus readers into a little book about punctuation with the puzzling title Eats, Shoots & Leaves? Partly it was author Lynne Truss’s ability to issue a mating call with her opening sentences:

  Either this will ring bells for you or it won’t. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. “Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.”

  If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.

  LITERARY OPENINGS

  Leads in the literary style, prone to excess or pretension, may be the trickiest to pull off. But good writing, when it prevails, burnishes a lead that already has something to say. For example, thousands of war reports have captured readers by virtue of their timeliness, their immediate relevance. Those that endure, however, tend to have a literary touch. Who but Ernest Hemingway could have written this lead to a Spanish Civil War dispatch?

  The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away. There is rifle fire all night long. The rifles go tacrong, capong, craang, tacrong, and then a machine gun opens up. . . . You lie and listen to it, and it is a great thing to be in bed with your feet stretched out gradually warming the cold foot of the bed and not out there. (NANA dispatch, 1937)

  Science writers—nature writers in particular—often favor the literary approach, so rhapsodic are they about their subjects. While the gushiest leads need capping, a deft writer like Richard Selzer (Mortal Lessons) promises art as well as fact:

  I sing of skin, layered as fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place. Here is each man bagged and trussed in perfect amiability. (1976)

  LEADS FOR LAUGHS

  The successful comedic lead, one that promises sustained mirth, must obey two cardinal rules: Be fast, and be funny. The supreme master of this form is humorist Dave Barry, who has quickly pried laughs from his readers in thousands of openings. Along the way, in a column called “Socket to Them,” he mocked the popular-science lead:

  Today’s scientific question is, What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster? Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along the carpet, then reach your hand into a friend’s mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. (—Bad Habits, 1985)

  So there you are. And here’s a related experiment for writers. Have a friend or younger sibling poke a finger between your teeth. Bite down. Observe the reaction. Is there stimulation? Is attention being paid? Aha—could it be a paradigm?

  Now, releasing the finger, go write your lead.

  EIGHTEEN

  CLOSINGS: THE THREE-POINT LANDING

  You are piloting a jumbo jetliner—just another of your cocky gestures—and somehow you have managed to take off, maintain a cruising altitude, and cross a continent. At last you are approaching the destination airport with your precious cargo intact. One problem: You have no idea how to get this baby down.

  Ever get that feeling with an ambitious piece of writing, especially in nonfiction? You’ve achieved liftoff against all odds, navigated past every hazard. But now you’re stuck in mid-air.

  As writers, we naturally focus on beginning a work and developing it, on all the challenges of getting and holding attention. Along the way we don’t think much about endings—just that we will write to length and make concluding noises in the last paragraph. But when we get there, feeling the expectations of all those readers invested in the journey, we wish we could touch down as gracefully, as meaningfully, as Apollo 11 did on the moon.

  In a nonfiction piece, an ending isn’t the end of the world—just the climax to everything you’ve labored to make affecting and saleable. Endings are last impressions. They are closing numbers, final chords, deal-sealers. They deliver readers to the intended destination, influence what satisfaction each will take away. For the many readers who browse endings or peek ahead to see where their
efforts will lead, endings can be invitations—the flip side of powerful openings.

  Those who outline their work have an opportunity to think about the closing, perhaps even rough out a concept. For other writers, a landing strategy is worth having in place before takeoff— but it needn’t involve control towers and runway lights. The idea is simply to end by design rather than default, and any of the following practices will help:

  • In your notes, keep track of potentially dramatic closing materials.

  • Hold one of your best examples or anecdotes for the closing.

  • Allow space for a developed ending.

  • Commit to a closing worthy of the piece.

  • Avoid the drift toward a clichéd ending.

  FLIPPING THE OLD PYRAMID