Stein on Writing (6 page)

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

Better because of the introduction of sound.

The following are all from the
New York Times.
Note how they involve the reader by focusing on a person:

Since learning last year that he had multiple sclerosis, Andy Torok has become less and less steady on his feet, and his worries have accumulated along with the hand prints on his apartment’s white walls.

That story made page one. Its real subject was the suspension of auto union talks because workers were loath to chip in for health care costs. All the facts are in the body of the story, but the reader, hooked by a beginning that focuses on an individual, gathers the facts as he reads an interesting piece.

In enhancing journalism with the techniques of fiction, caution is required. It’s easy to overdo the attempt at analogy. One can feel the
New York Times
reporter straining for effect in the following attempt to lure the reader into the sometimes dull material of a House of Representatives vote:

Washington, Aug. 5 [1993]—If politics is theater, as the skeptics say, tonight was classic Hitchcock, with a very large dose of Frank Capra.

There on the House floor, Bill Clinton’s budget package and his Presidency clung to credibility every bit like Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest,” clinging to the face of Mount Rushmore. Mr. Clinton’s Democratic supporters held a 216-to-214 margin.

The following
Times
story starts the right way:

It is nearly 10 p.m. and the toll taker at the Triborough Bridge’s Manhattan Plaza is near the end of her shift. Her routine is methodical, icily efficient. She glances out the window to see the kind and size of vehicle approaching. She then pushes a button to electronically post the fare on a display screen.

In a practiced movement, she reaches out for money. She hands back a token or change. She does this 300 times an hour, three seconds a car, an endless stream of stop-and-go.

Such are the labors of one of life’s invisible people, a toll taker for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which last year collected $653.6 million from 277 million vehicles. This particular transaction is recorded in grainy black-and-white images on a jerky surveillance video tape. The woman, who officials would not name, is about to become a statistic, one of 26 Bridge and Tunnel officers to be robbed at gunpoint this year, already three times the number in all 1992.

A black car stops. A man in a ski mask thrusts a sawed-off shotgun through his window. As quickly as the human mind can perceive and respond, the toll taker shoves a trayful of money into his hands. The car lurches into the darkness.

So far so good. The writer, Douglas Martin, has pulled you through four paragraphs of a story about robberies at tollbooths by focusing on an individual. But the hazard of overdoing it is there. The next paragraph reads:

The woman pivots to catch the license plate number. Then her head drops like a rock, her back heaves convulsively and she bites her lip. An armed sergeant is at her window in 10 seconds. The robber has not been caught.

That paragraph needs editing. The account turns melodramatic. The toll taker’s head drops like a cliché, her back “heaves convulsively”—and unbelievably. She clichés her lip. And suddenly there is an armed sergeant at her window. Did she get the license plate? We’ll never know.

Journalists seeking to pack as much information as possible into the opening paragraph might usefully attend to the following by Natalie Angler, from the science section of the
New York Times:

As any serious migraine sufferer knows, an attack can bring pain without pity or horizon, a pain so stupendous that it obliterates work, family, thought, otherness. Yet for all its galactic sweep when it strikes, migraine is a mundane and commonplace ailment, afflicting about 12 percent of the population. It is a trait passed along from parent to offspring with the seeming ease of wispy hair or nearsightedness: three-quarters of all sufferers are thought to have an inherited predisposition to the disorder.

Note the use of metaphoric language, “pain without pity or horizon.” How much stronger “horizon” is than “endless” would be. Note also “galactic sweep,” an effective and original way of conveying degree. Contrast helps. In the same sentence as “galactic sweep” the ailment is characterized as “mundane and commonplace.” (“Commonplace” alone would have served. See “One plus one equals one half,” page 205.) Instead of just tossing “genetic predisposition” at the reader, Angier talks of “wispy hair or nearsightedness.” It’s a writerly paragraph that arouses our expectation not only of information but fine writing as well.

Here is a short list of reminders that can help if you’re drafting a first paragraph in a hurry to meet a deadline: Does your first sentence trigger curiosity to make the reader want to continue? What will the reader
see
in that first sentence? Have you focused on an individual? Have you given us a visible characteristic of that individual? Have you portrayed the individual doing or saying something? Is there a startling or odd fact that will trap attention?

Let’s see what some experienced writers of features, articles, and books have been doing with first sentences.

Andy Warhol, draftsman of shoes, is dead, and the people viewing his remains are mostly wearing scuffed white sneakers.

Note the visual parallel. An obit or memorial piece doesn’t have to be dull. That was Stuart Klawans, writing in
Grand Street.

Jay McInerney knows how to make his opening sentence visual:

A year after his death, the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening.

A novel comparison also makes a good hook:

At the Academy Awards, the entrance to the Shrine Civil Auditorium is flanked by four giant Oscars quite, or so it seems to me, like sullen art deco Nazis.

The sentence might have been improved by omitting “or so it seems to me” but the comparison is startling and strong nevertheless. It was by Stanley Elkin for
Harper’s
magazine. Here’s another:

I’m talking to my friend Kit Herman when I notice a barely perceptible spot on the left side of his face.

That’s Randy Shilts in
Esquire
focusing on an ominous blemish. Here’s a lead that might be a turn-off:

The doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.

But Anatole Broyard was a brilliant as well as brave writer, and here’s how he actually started his essay “Intoxicated by My Illness”:

So much of a writer’s life consists of assumed suffering, rhetorical suffering, that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.

He enhances the hard fact with contrast, resonance, and surprise. In
death, life.

Can you bring a fresh insight to your first sentence? Fiction writers are said to “reach down their throats” for truths that enable them to write from the inside. Can candor at the beginning help your article, perhaps something you would rather the world not know that you might keep secret if you were not a writer?

Alternatively, can you mint a new description for a familiar object the way Stanley Elkin did when he saw the Academy Award statues as Art Deco Nazis?

Let’s look at some examples of first sentences from short nonfiction that has endured:

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent ...

That’s just the first half of the first sentence of George Orwell’s essay “Reflections on Gandhi.” We don’t think of judging saints. And Orwell inverts the usual “innocent until proven guilty,” producing two attention-getters in half a sentence.

Orwell, though best known for his novels
Animal Farm
and
1984,
was one of the best nonfiction writers of the century. No journalist, whether or not he covers political events, should miss reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Can good writing about natural history hook the reader at the start? Here’s an example by Loren Eiseley:

I have long been an admirer of the octopus.

Octopus? Admirer? That opening is both surprising and a touch amusing. One goes on reading, which is what first sentences are supposed to encourage.

A first sentence can be used to announce a theme dramatically. Witness the following by Robert Warshow from
Encounter
magazine:

The two most successful creations of American movies are the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns.

To demonstrate the use of effective first sentences in longer nonfiction, I have selected first sentences from two autobiographies by authors I knew well:

Many problems confront an autobiographer, and I am confident that I have not solved them.

I see no reason why the reader should be interested in my private life.

Both examples entice with a slight surprise because they do the opposite of what we expect. Both seem to be disclaimers. Each is a cover-up for a fault. They both might be characterized as pseudo-candor, which can be as effective as candor. They are both interesting beginnings that invite us to go on.

The first is from Sidney Hook’s
Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century.
The second is from Bertram D. Wolfe’s
A Life in Two Centuries,
a book important enough to make the front page of
The New York Times Book Review.

Let’s move from first sentences in longer nonfiction to first paragraphs that invite the reader to continue:

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village. I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an American—that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.

That first paragraph is by a then largely unknown writer named James Baldwin. The last sentence in the quoted paragraph could have been its first, an immediate hook, but if the author had done that, the paragraph would wind down instead of building toward a climax, which is more effective.

The subject of another first paragraph was the republication by Scribner’s of Peter Fleming’s first book, written right after an adventure when he was only twenty-four. A blah lead-in would have been:

Peter Fleming was only twenty-four when he experienced and wrote his
Brazilian Adventure.

Here’s how it was done:

Children, those energetic dervishes, are too busy testing themselves against the world to know the meaning of boredom for very long; high adventure waits for them in every breakable object. It is in adolescence that boredom, time without life, insinuates itself into each passing day. But the adolescent with a good mind and a university education to acquire may wait until he is 24 or more before life begins to pall. That is precisely the age at which Peter Fleming, in 1932, answered an advertisement.

The fact in the last sentence of the paragraph would normally have gone into the first sentence. It was put last for two reasons. It was given the job of thrusting the reader forward into the next paragraph. More important was the establishment of tone.

In my first reading of nonfiction I sometimes find that a good lead is buried elsewhere in the draft. Brought forward it can replace a less
worthy beginning and help ensure that a reader will be turned on to reading the whole.

Thomas Henry Huxley was a nineteenth-century physician credited with popularizing Darwin’s ideas and other scientific thought of his time. Popularizing? Try, if you can, this opening paragraph of his famous essay “The Method of Scientific Investigation”:

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that the action of the scales in the one case and the balance in the other differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working, but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.

Huxley’s essay, believe it or not, is used as a model in some twentieth-century textbooks. It is not, to put it mildly, a model of clarity, and it certainly isn’t interesting to read. Let’s look at someone else’s treatment of the same material: