Stein on Writing (5 page)

It is a useful exercise for writers to spend time in their libraries at home or in public libraries, looking at the first few pages of the books that have pleased them most in order to find the exact place where the engine turns on, where the reader will not want to put the book down.

There are many ways to arouse the reader’s interest at the start of a story or novel. A character can want something important, want it badly, and want it now. Or a likable character can be threatened. The reader who savors language can be aroused by the author’s language, but that arousal won’t last unless the reader also becomes involved in the life of a character who is quickly more interesting than most of the people who surround us in life.

If your aim is publication, your best bet is to start with a scene that the reader can see. Where do you start that scene? As close to its climax as is feasible if your aim is to involve the reader quickly.

Nonfiction

At the beginning of a piece of nonfiction, the goal of the writer is the same as that of a writer of fiction: to spark the reader’s interest sufficiently to engage him in reading the rest. The principle applies to both transient and durable nonfiction.

Most writing for newspapers, for instance, is by its nature transient, usually written one day, read the next, and no longer available thereafter. Most writers of books, essays, and similar work hope that what they write will endure. These categories overlap. Much that appears in hardcovers isn’t durable. And some writing for transient media has remained as part of the culture that is passed from generation to generation.

Though the work I have guided has been mainly durable in its intent, journalists and others have persuaded me of their eagerness to make their transient copy livelier, stronger, and more enjoyable. The once “good, gray”
New York Times
is no longer gray but colorful.

An easy way to interest the reader at the outset is by the use of surprise. Here are two examples from the
Times
by Stephen Manes and Keith Brasher respectively:

When it comes to shopping for a computer, the most important peripheral runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and is known as a friend.

Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through mesquite-covered, coyote-infested shrub
land, several hundred bearers of a strategic commodity of the United States of America are gathered.

They are goats.

The trend toward such openings is resisted by some who think that lively writing is somehow impure. For them I have an image that I convey to my classes. Imagine a continuous line, with Life at one end, Death at the other.

Life---------------------------------------------------Boredom-----------Death

On that line boredom—a loss of experience—belongs close to death. Successful writing immerses the reader in heightened experience—emotional, intellectual, or both—more rewarding than the life around him. Dull writing doesn’t provide pleasure. And whatever information and insight it contains will be available only to those who are prepared to tolerate the task of mining dull prose.

For purists I would point out that much academic writing is counter-educational because its dullness insulates its information from nearly everybody. Geoffrey Cotterell is credited with saying, “In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.” As this extravagant exaggeration entertains, it manages to make its point much better than a straight-faced dissertation on the same subject would.

If readers could talk back to writers (they sometimes do by not reading their work) they might say, “Would you knowingly go to a physician who was weak in his craft? Would you attend a badly conducted concert just because it was available? Would you bring your car for a tune-up to a mechanic who thought fine-tuning was a waste of his time?” The reader trusts the writer to do his best. If he does his second-best, he shouldn’t be surprised if his reader finds another writer to read.

During most of the thirty-six years in which I was a publisher of books, I had the responsibility of seeing a hundred new titles reach the public each year. The great majority were nonfiction; a few became standard works. There is no reason why nonfiction—including journalism—cannot be as interesting and enjoyable as fiction. Information sticks best when it is crafted to touch the reader’s emotions. The journalist or biographer or historian need not also be a novelist to use the devices of fiction to have his work provide a more intense experience for his readers.

When the journalist crams who, what, when, where, and why into the first paragraph, how can he hold the reader’s attention for the whole of what he has written? Naked facts are frequently not enough to invite a reader’s attention to the rest of the story. It is their context—the writing, the container of the information—that illuminates facts for the reader and gives them significant meaning. Writers of nonfiction have the right—perhaps even the responsibility—to access the wonders of the writer’s craft to make their work interesting and enjoyable.

It was once thought that responsible journalism in reporting the news required adherence to dry fact and that only columnists and feature writers could allow color, metaphor, and even exaggeration for effect into their writings. As an example of how untrue that is of today’s journalism, I chose the following lead front-page story from the
New York Times
quite arbitrarily on a day when I was addressing this subject in public. Needless to say, there are worthy and interesting newspapers in quite a few cities from which examples could have been chosen. Here is the first paragraph under the byline of Calvin Sims:

An 87-year-old water main ruptured outside of Grand Central Terminal just before the morning rush hour yesterday, unleashing a deluge that ruined a newly renovated subway station and plunged commuters into a snarl of flooded subway lines and pulverized asphalt. The 20-inch main, which runs east and west along 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenue, broke at about 5:45 A.M. Water surged upward, heaving 42d Street into a small mountain range, then cascaded down staircases and ventilation grates like so many waterfalls, flooding the subway tracks below. The repair process was delayed for hours because the city’s Environmental Protection Department misidentified the site of the rupture and mistakenly shut off the wrong main.

Note the colorful exaggeration that strays from strict fact. The street asphalt was not literally crushed into powder (“pulverized”) but broken into slabs and pieces. And 42d Street did not literally become “a small mountain range,” which my dictionary identifies as “a mass of land that rises to a great height, especially of over one thousand feet.”

The reporter’s use of exaggeration and metaphor apparently caused no qualms among his editors. Those opening sentences were meant to tempt the reader to read on.

On the same front page quoted above, there was a related story under a three-column headline plus a subhead:

A Day That New York Shoulda Stood In Bed
.

EXPRESSWAYS STALL, SUBWAYS STUMBLE AND BUSES STAGGER

That headline and subhead serve as the beginning, hooking the reader. As for the subhead, expressways don’t stall, cars do; subways cannot stumble, nor can buses stagger. But all that colorful inaccuracy gets the idea across with a touch of humor and pulls the reader into a story in which buses “limped up and down avenues” and “Taxis crawled along at a speed somewhere between that of a turtle and a snail”—none of which was literally true. What counts is that the reader is entertained while reading about what happened, and none of the similes, metaphors, and exaggerations mislead a single reader one bit.

Exceptionally good first paragraphs buoy editors and prize-givers as well as readers. A terrific ending will never be experienced by readers put off by a poor beginning, which is why beginnings get so much emphasis here. What can the journalist writing news stories on the run do to hook the reader?

When John F. Burns of the
New York Times
won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in 1993, his paper reproduced the following paragraph as an example of his prize-winning style in his reporting from the former Yugoslavia:

As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.

Burns helps us see a besieged city by focusing on a single individual performing an eccentric and somehow beautiful act. Spotlighting an individual who is characterized, however briefly, is an excellent way of involving the reader’s emotions.

Can it be done in the course of a reporter’s harried work? John Burns wrote 163 articles in the former Yugoslavia in a little over nine months, 103 of them with Sarajevo datelines at a time when TV crews couldn’t get into the city or get their film out of the city. If Burns could write so many
articles in so short a period and still remember not just to report facts but to involve the reader’s emotions by focusing on an individual, no journalist in a more comfortable environment has an excuse for not trying.

The workaday experience of reporting news, particularly local news, does not have the built-in drama of reporting from a war zone, but that doesn’t prevent the use of the same techniques to hook readers into local news stories. Let’s look at some examples and determine what makes them work:

Yesterday morning Henry Sorbino walked into the K-Mart on Eleventh Street carrying an umbrella and walked out carrying an umbrella and someone else’s purse.

What is the key ingredient that makes that opening sentence work? Did you note that repeating the word “umbrella” underscored Sorbino’s walking out with someone else’s purse? That technique—repetition for effect—increases the dramatic impact of what’s being described.

Can you pick out the ingredient that makes the difference in the following lead?

At exactly 10:19 a.m. yesterday, a grandmother’s purse on a conveyor belt at Orange County airport set off an alarm that caused two security guards to rush to the scene.

Did you note the word “grandmother”? The reporter could have said her name, Alice Hackmeyer, instead, but it wouldn’t have created the same contrast with the event as “grandmother” does.

Did you note also that the introduction of action—the security guards rushing to the scene—helped dramatize that first sentence?

Here’s another easily adaptable technique. First the blah version:

The Buschkowski family moved from a rented apartment into its own home for the first time today.

That doesn’t sound like news. And it certainly doesn’t sound interesting, though it is factually accurate. How might a first sentence excite the reader’s curiosity?

It took fourteen years for the Buschkowski family to move two blocks.

That lead turns on the engine of curiosity, the driving force that gets readers beyond the first sentences.

Here’s another blah beginning of a kind that’s found in hundreds of papers every day:

Carl Gardhof was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning.

It sounds as if the reporter, bored with reporting endless routine cases, decided to bore his readers in turn. If he’d trained himself as an observer, he might have written the following:

Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning.

A visual element can almost always be introduced to perk up a lead. This one conveys the attitude of the person without the cliché of “maintaining his innocence.” We haven’t yet found out what Carl Gardhof did. It’d be nice if it was for something like this:

Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning for stealing a Bible.

But even if it was for punching a policeman, or a third offense of shoplifting, or whatever, that first sentence has it made because of the visual that starts it, which needn’t be a head held high:

Carl Gardhof, who had trouble keeping his eyes on the judge, was sentenced in Superior Court to six months in jail this morning for his fourth conviction of flashing in public. :

Most reported offenses sound ordinary. A visual touch can make them seem out-of-the-ordinary and stimulate the reader to continue with the story.

If court reporting can be lifted out of dullness, think what technique can do for the reporting of routine social events:

George Brucell was led into the meeting room by the chairman.

Again, blah.

George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the chairman ushered him into the meeting room.

Head-ducking is not much of an action, but a reporter who is a keen observer of small detail would have the advantage of the novelist in picturing Brucell and giving him an action, however small, like ducking his head: