Taking the Lead

You pick up a newspaper. You buy a magazine. You open a new book. The first sentence, the first paragraph, these are the most important lines in any of the articles, the beginning of the story.

The question is how to write an incredible lead. How do you pen an opening that includes and dissolves the body of information being disseminated to its inevitable end?

The best leads own everything and divulge nothing. They include the total summation of the story but leave enough wiggle room to suggest this isn't all the data. They tease.

From there, assuming you've hooked the reader into continuing, you dissect each point that was made in the lead into the real story, the long story.

I like to think of the reader sitting across the table from me. The reader isn't reading, she's listening (what are words but a transferal of thought) to a summation of an incredible experience I had as a reporter in Chicago. I say something that creates more interest. When I'm finished with the cliffs notes version, she says, "tell me more."

This is the reaction you want to create with your lead. And it's as easy as telling it straight, and quick. Of course, it couldn't hurt, the language you use, the twists of fate.

Here are a couple of good first lines:

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.
Libra - Don DeLillo

Monday, 27 January 129 lbs. (total fat groove), boyfriends 1 (hurrah!), shags 3 (hurrah!), calories 2,100, calories used up by shags 600, so total calories 1,500 (exemplary).
Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason - Helen Fielding

The first first line, from Don DeLillo, is the opening to a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President John Kennedy. The second first line from Helen Fielding is about an obsessed modern everywoman.

In each instance you get an idea of the setting, the mental state of the character around whom the story is about to unfold. Granted, the selections above are from fictions, and a newsy intro would undoubtedly read another way. However, in order to make the point of capturing the reader in the very moment that is at the crux of the matter, it is of great import to verbally lead them there.

My suggestion: Visit a library or bookstore and open everything on the shelves. Read the first line. Read the first paragraph. Does it inspire you to keep reading? If so, why? If no, why not?

If you're having trouble writing your own lead for something, try grabbing every bit of information you can and cramming it into a sentence that funnels to a singularity. If possible refine the entire story to a word.

If you can do that, well, you can write the rest of it too.

Found: First Novel Notes, part one

Recently, I was cleaning out a small room in the house so I might better utilize it for something other than storage of random art things and wine.

In doing so, I came across a box containing notes and magazine clippings and books and memorabilia I had collected. The theme of the items in the box was a novel, my first attempt at one at least.

Please note at this time: The novel was not also in the box.

But in a flash I was rewriting it. I could quite literally smell the room where it all begins, the confusion of characters as they wake.

I found myself waxing.

That might be what this is … a waxing. A rebuffing of the terms of the novel, as I once understood them. To sit down with it again. To rework it, publish it.

The question is how. How do you return to a project ten years in the making and two fifths finished?

The box is a good place to start.

In this particular instance, I set myself up fairly well. When originally I was doing research for the novel, I collected enough fodder to get me started and keep me writing indefinitely.

There are character sketches and deep rooted paradigms that branch out as to be the sky’s competition of breadth. I attempted to know my characters better than they knew themselves. I needed to know them in order to bring them to the scenes they were in.

Even now, the steps are evident. From obstacles to character goals and scenes. I lay the notes from the box in columns on the floor. I draw a line of tape down the back of a complex of scenes and hold it up. That scene literally gets taped to another, and another.

Soon there’s a family-tree of the story.

I could sit down right now and begin where I was. In theory.

It wouldn’t be hard. But I decide the better route is to see if there’s a manuscript laying around somewhere.

And I go back to cleaning the storage room.