Essay Opener

[Rene Seiler]

Peopletrying to get better at narrative, non-fiction, opinionated writing like essays, blog posts, and conference talks. Most of this advice won't necessarily apply to fiction writing, academic writing, or technical documentation writing... but it might help.

To be clear, I make these mistakes too. I am a mediocre opener trying to become a good opener. Opening well isn't just about snapping up someone's attention and keeping them reading for a few lines. You can't write good openings without having good ideas, good arguments, good structure, and good storytelling skills. Everything hangs off that starting point, so it's worth learning how to nail it.

In trying to become a better opener, I've collected explicit advice from a few books on writing: Stephen Pinker's , John McPhee's , and Joseph Williams' . Alongside implicit advice from studying lots of classic essayists like , , , and .

I'm certainly not against a slightly slower narrative opening that sets the scene before making the puzzle or conundrum clear, but you can't take too long to get there. Here's a more drawn out one from Rebecca Solnit that gives you some scenic details before pointing out the curiosity; priviledged tech workers in San Fransisco fail to understand why locals hate them.

Let's have another Rebecca Solnit one because she's so damn good at this. Here's an opening for a piece on how we shouldn't think about fixing climate climate as a swift, immediate task, but instead a slow, gradual, persistent challenge.

Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.

Your challenge is finding the compelling problem in your topic, and clearly presenting it up front. That problem might be deeply buried under a bunch of boring facts and informational details. It might be hard to figure out what it is, and hard to describe once you've found it.

Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one.

Your interest in the topic is your best directional clue for finding the tension or interesting paradox. Your urge to write about the thing hopefully comes from a place of curiosity. You have unanswered questions about it. It feels important or consequential for unexplained reasons. You think you've seen things in it other people haven't. Pay attention to that interest.

The change here could be a new technological or cultural development like carbon sequestration, web components, critical race theory, or crowd funding. Or it could be a single event like someone making an influential speech or stepping down as a leader.

The change doesn't have to be bad and the consequences aren't necessarily negative. It's simply that the state of the world has shifted, and there are knock-on effects that your community (a.k.a. your readers or assumed audience) should care about and explore solutions or responses to. These are changes they need to react to in some way, even if we don't yet have a clear solution.

It's a good exercise to read openings in essays or news articles and try to identify these. They don't always appear in order, and they're usually spread over the first few paragraphs. Here's another example from a New York Times opinion piece:

These examples are clearly a bit simplified and boring. Williams is speaking to a community of academic writers in his book. They're trying to present scientific and research problems in plain, objective language, which isn't necessarily what we want to do with narrative writing like blogging or personal essays.

We have a little more liberty to put interesting padding around the change, consequences, and solution, such as telling an opening anecdote, or drawing readers in with characters, rich details, and sensory descriptions.

For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone. You have to have some kind of problem that matters. Even if it's a personal problem like a medical issue, career challenge, or difficult technical bug, you're hopefully writing about it to help others encountering a similar situation.

There's an opening style I've seen a lot in publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic that effectively places us in a real time and place, with real characters we want to follow along with. It goes like this:

I said before the chronological beginning is rarely the most compelling or important part of a story. If your story has a narrative over time (and almost all do, even if it's about why you like a hot ), you might need to start telling it in the middle, then jump back to the beginning later on to fill readers in.

John McPhee is the master of structuring narrative writing. If you're unfamiliar with his work, start with his , or consider his Pulitzer Prize winning on the geological history of the United States. Anyway, the guy knows how to make rocks consistently fascinating for 660 pages.

These are the shapes of stories. When McPhee writes, after first immersing himself in his raw material (field notes, interview transcripts, official documents) for weeks, he then draws a structure for the work. The structure lays out the major themes and scenes he'll work through, in the order that will make them most compelling and coherent.

Developing a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.

Live conference talk audiences are trapped in a way reading audiences are not. They can't close the tab on your presentation. So I try to quickly give them more explanation of where my story is going and why it's worth their valuable attention.

I've been trapped in plenty of audiences where we're 5 minutes into an anecdote about the speaker's childhood, and the whole room is desperately trying to figure out what The Point is. This is cruel and frustrating.

To open a jam jar, you should run it under a very hot tap. Resort to the kettle if your tap is lukewarm. The heat makes the metal lid expand faster than the glass, which creates space between the lid and the jar.

Then place a tea towel over lid, firmly grip the top, and twist. Repeat until you run out of grip strength, and then recruit someone else to help. They will effortlessly pop it off for you. Do not skip the last step.

Some people advise banging the jar lid on the counter-top to loosen it, but I once smashed a pickle jar this way, showering myself in vingear, soggy dill, and tiny glass shards. I now believe it's not worth the risk.

Every essay or assignment you write must begin with an introduction. It might be helpful to think of the introduction as an inverted pyramid. In such a pyramid, you begin by presenting a broad introduction to the topic and end by making a more focused point about that topic in your thesis statement. The introduction has three essential parts, each of which serves a particular purpose.

The first part is the "attention-grabber." You need to interest your reader in your topic so that they will want to continue reading. You also want to do that in a way that is fresh and original. For example, although it may be tempting to begin your essay with a dictionary definition, this technique is stale because it has been widely overused. Instead, you might try one of the following techniques:

From this attention grabbing opener, you would need to move to the next part of the introduction, in which you offer some relevant background on the specific purpose of the essay. This section helps the reader see why you are focusing on this topic and makes the transition to the main point of your paper. For this reason, this is sometimes called the "transitional" part of the introduction.

In the example above, the anecdote about Michelle might capture the reader's attention, but the essay is not really about Michelle. The attention grabber might get the reader thinking about how drunk driving can destroy people's lives, but it doesn't introduce the topic of the need for stricter drunk driving penalties (or whatever the real focus of the paper might be).

Therefore, you need to bridge the gap between your attention-grabber and your thesis with some transitional discussion. In this part of your introduction, you narrow your focus of the topic and explain why the attention-grabber is relevant to the specific area you will be discussing. You should introduce your specific topic and provide any necessary background information that the reader would need in order to understand the problem that you are presenting in the paper. You can also define any key terms the reader might not know.

Continuing with the example above, we might move from the narrative about Michelle to a short discussion of the scope of the problem of drunk drivers. We might say, for example: "Michelle's story is not isolated. Each year XX (number) of lives are lost due to drunk-driving accidents." You could follow this with a short discussion of how serious the problem is and why the reader should care about this problem. This effectively moves the reader from the story about Michelle to your real topic, which might be the need for stricter penalties for drinking and driving.

Finally, the introduction must conclude with a clear statement of the overall point you want to make in the paper. This is called your "thesis statement." It is the narrowest part of your inverted pyramid, and it states exactly what your essay will be arguing.

In this scenario, your thesis would be the point you are trying to make about drunk driving. You might be arguing for better enforcement of existing laws, enactment of stricter penalties, or funding for education about drinking and driving. Whatever the case, your thesis would clearly state the main point your paper is trying to make. Here's an example: "Drunk driving laws need to include stricter penalties for those convicted of drinking under the influence of alcohol." Your essay would then go on to support this thesis with the reasons why stricter penalties are needed.

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