"The Writing Guy" | I write about writing, learning and business | Founder & CEO, Write of Passage
Bad writers wait too long to get into the good stuff. You can think of your title, subtitle, and first few sentences as a sales funnel. Even after somebody's opened your piece, you need to persuade them to keep reading. Here's how you can write better intros: 1) Surprise: Create Suspense You don't need as many words as you think. Sometimes, it only takes one sentence to capture a reader's attention. These one-sentence hooks work particularly well for thrilling and suspenseful pieces. • "On two separate occasions, I've woken up to an intruder breaking into my home after midnight (years apart and in different states)." • "I wanted to strangle mother but I’d have to touch her to do it." — Loretta Hudson • “Every time I see it, that number blows my mind." 2) Insight: Teach the Reader Though these ones are a little bit longer, it doesn't take long for the reader to learn something, and that spark of insight launches them into the piece because they come to see the author as an authority. Both the examples below make the reader say: "Hmmmmm..." • Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic. — Paul Graham • During a regular dive in the sea, Alexey Molchanov can go 131 meters deep (or about 43 stories) while holding a single breath for nearly five minutes. In that period, his body experiences more gravitational stress than an astronaut during a launch into space. — Polina Marinova Pompliano 3) Set the Scene A few sentences is all it takes to throw the reader into the story. You don't need many words to create a narrative arc, and the words you do choose set the frame for the rest of the piece. • Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. Later cartoons were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at onerous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons – most of them short, most of them liked, and most of them losing money. Disney and his studio were nearly broke. — Morgan Housel • On February 10, 2002, in a New York State prison cell, the bestselling author and twice-convicted killer Jack Abbott hanged himself with an improvised noose. That same day, the body of the man I murdered washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in a nylon laundry bag. My reason for connecting these events is to account for my crime. — John J. Lennon To hone your knack for writing introductions, study stand-up comedians. Note how quickly they set the frame for their jokes. They rarely need more than 1-2 sentences to set the scene and make the audience laugh. Your introductions don't need to be funny, but they should be captivating, and you don't need many words to do that.