Sir Laurence Olivier once said his goal, whenever he walked out on stage, was to seduce every woman in the audience. Whether he played Hamlet or Macbeth or Richard III, he wanted to draw his audience into an intense and sensual relationship. And he did not want to wait.
In this too-busy world, the writer needs to seduce the reader right away. If you do not lure the reader, he will go elsewhere. Every lead should somehow make the reader want to turn to a friend and say, “Hey, get a load of this.”
Whether you write a newspaper article, a short story or novel, a memoir or historical story—or even an academic argument about presidential power or the psychology of twins—you need to draw the reader into your piece. You cannot expect a reader to want to read just because you want to write. As Tom Wolfe asks, “Why should the reader be expected to just lie flat and let these people come tromping through his mind as if it were a subway turnstile?”
Leads can be as short as a single word or several paragraphs. Depending on the subject, audience, and medium, you will have more or less space to bring your reader into the story.
A Simple Trick
Fred Strebeigh, a writing teacher at Yale, gives his students an essay and asks students to mark the end of the introduction with a slash. Some put the mark after a sentence, others after a paragraph, and others still after seven or eight paragraphs. But most students usually agree on a place where the story’s questions and themes have been laid out. There is no right answer, but the exercise shows his hard it can be to say enough but not too much, quickly but not too quickly.
Hook the Reader Right Away
How much time do you have to seduce the reader? Media experts say TV commercials have only two or three seconds to grab the viewer. People giving business presentations—before a captive audience!—only have a couple minutes to engage the audience. Donna Britt, a columnist for The Washington Post, says: “I have a couple of paragraphs, at most, to convince my reader: You don’t know everything you need to know about this. Given that, it’s really important to start off with a bang.”
Make it a Preview
A good lede requires more than a big come-on. You also need to preview the story or argument. Read the first lines of The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls:
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.
Want to read more? Of course you do. Walls brings you directly into the story. Using concrete images, she puts you in a particular place (a cab on a city street) and introduces you to a compelling character (her mother). She gives you the sensual details you need to feel the moment (“blustery March wind,” “steam,” collars turned up”). And she tells you something that demands an explanation (why her mother roots through a dumpster).
In sixty-nine simple words, Walls either reveals or teases us about the five W’s and one H—who (she and her mom), what (mother-daughter estrangement, eccentric behavior), when (an ordinary night), where (in the city), why and how (she will tell us—we hope). Just three sentences into a 288-page book, she has given us a cliffhanger that makes us want to read more.
Writers get in trouble when they open with an anecdote that does not explore the story’s core question. If you open with lush details about a person or place, or if you open with a vivid story, that might not be enough. You need to show, somehow, why these characters, places, or events matter. As Chekhov said, “One must not put a loaded gun on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
Beyond the Five W’s
In the old days, before 24-hour news cycles, reporters learned to present the five W’s in every opening paragraph. The reader needed a quick overview of the story. The classic formula delivered. Nowadays, readers need a different kind of lead. They still need the five W’s, but they need an angle on old information.
Whether writing a hard-news story for a newspaper or more complex lead for a magazine or book, the goal remains the same. Think of the opening statement, the thesis, as a promise or a contract. The bargain is simple: In exchange for the reader’s time, the writer will deliver important arguments and enough evidence to prove those arguments. The reader deserves to know what she is getting into. She deserves to know whether the expedition is worth her while, and she deserves the information she needs to hold the writer accountable.
Read These Winning Leads
Read these leads from recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize:
Eric Newhouse (Great Falls Tribune in Montana) on the pervasiveness of alcohol in American society: “’When they put my baby on my breast, I knew something was wrong, so I lifted my head to look at him,’ Maza Weya said of her newborn. ‘I could smell the alcohol on his breath,’ she said. ‘My baby was born drunk.’ After years of drinking everything she could get her hands on, Maza Weya has managed to become sober. Her son isn’t so lucky.”
Gene Weingarten (The Washington Post) on how the public responds to a virtuoso violinist working as a street musician: “He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.”
Julia Keller (The Chicago Tribune) on the awful power of a tornado: “Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that’s the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It’s a long, deep breath. It’s no time at all. It’s an eternity.
Rick Bragg (The New York Times) on the rebuilding of New Orleans: “The little shotgun house is peeling and the Oldsmobile in front is missing a rear bumper, but Larry Bannock can glimpse glory through the eye of his needle. For almost a year he has hunkered over his sewing table, joining beads, velvet, rhinestones, sequins, feathers and ostrich plumes into a Mardi Gras costume that is part African, part Native American.”
Kenneth Weiss (Los Angeles Times) on the pervasive pollution of the oceans: “The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour. When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos. ‘It comes up like little boils,’ said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. ‘At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked.’”
Diana Sugg (The Baltimore Sun) on the tragedy of stillborn children: “That chilly night in late October, the delivery room was so quiet. The doctor wrapped the 8-pound, 21-inch newborn girl in a pink-and-blue striped cotton blanket, pulled a matching cap over her brown hair and gently passed her to her mother. Margarete Heber cradled the baby. In the dim light, Heber could see the infant had her dark eyes, turned-up nose and distinctive chin. Perfect, except she was tinged blue. She had died just hours before she was born. Her birth would be her good-bye. “I am sorry,” Heber whispered, kissing her stillborn daughter on the forehead. “I am so, so sorry.”
Each of these leads puts the reader in a specific place. Usually, that place offers telling clues about the story’s characters and struggles. Often, that place shows a contradiction, which introduces a story of unexpected success or failure.
To test a lead, read it to someone and ask: “Now that know the topic, what else do you want to know?” If the listener cares and asks lots of questions, the lead probably works. Those questions can actually create a workable outline. When you frame an issue the right way, everything else follows naturally.
The Art of the Long Lead
Sit back for a few moments and read his 1997 Sports Illustrated profile of a family of tightrope walkers:
Consider your sister-in-law. Picture your whole family round the dining room table or the holidays, and start with your sister-in-law as she’s spooning the gravy. Think of all her strengths, her good intentions, as well as all the things that make you want to stick your fork into your thigh.
Look, I know you don’t know me from Adam—but just indulge me for a minute before the showstopper comes on. Turn to your brother now. You’re studying him as he drains his third beer, thinking of all the stupid arguments you’ve had, all the quirks of his that have made your teeth grind since you were kids.
Now your spouse. Don’t worry, she’s oblivious; she’s yapping to her sister. Consider her moods, her hormones, her chocolate addiction—the whole works. Got it?
Now close your eyes and imagine this. Imagine all of you at that table—brothers, sisters, in-laws—forming a human pyramid. Seven of you, stacked up in three tiers, except you’re not on the ground. You’re on a wire the width of your ring finger…three stories above the ground…the person on top standing on a chair…and no safety net below. To survive, your family has to synchronize every step and walk from one end of the 34-foot wire to the other. Just one failure to accommodate one of the niggling little pushes or pulls from that sister-in-law, one old jealousy between you and your brother, one bad night with your wife—hell, one cough or sneeze—and it’s coffins for all of you.
One more thing. You have to do this not once, but seven days a week, for two years, all over the country. Traveling and eating and sleeping and dressing together, hating one another and loving one another and handing one another your lives again and again and…. Look, the Guerreros are almost ready now.
LADEEZ and GENTLEMEN! You are about to witness CIRCUS HISTORY! Fifty years after the Wallenda family ASTONISHED the world with an UNPRECEDENTED seven-man pyramid on the high wire….
I read this lead to a writing class at Yale and asked students what else they wanted to know. They shouted out all kinds of questions: How did the Guerreros get involved in this business? What are their family feuds? Anyone ever get killed? How much do they make? How do they do it? And more. Guess what? The students’ questions formed a perfect outline of Gary Smith’s piece.
That is the sign of a great lead—when people want to know more, and they have a sense of what additional information they get by reading on.
Gary Smith’s lead does it all. He brings us into the world of the story—the circus, with all its odd characters and mysteries. He shows us something about the dizzying world of the characters—that high wire is three stories above the ground! He shows us something human—do they actually bicker? He gives us suspense—will they fall?
Are you ready to read more? I am.
The best leads combine vivid characters, conflict, and suspense about something that matters. Whether writing about a presidential assassination or a feature story about acrobats, you need to give the reader useful information and an emotional stake in the story.
