The Importance of First Impressions

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

They say you only get one chance to make a first impression. Dating. Job interviews. Being a contestant on Married at First Sight. Road rage incidents. You know the sort of thing.

In writing, the same applies. It's no secret that it is rare to overcome a bad start in any kind of story form. I’m not just talking about first lines here, though those are important too, but about the first few paragraphs, where you pull back the curtain on the story world.

Your job as a writer is to seduce and engage, to make the reader care enough to read on. Nowhere is that more important than in your first contact with the reader. You can read more about this idea in this recent Writing Talk post:

Make your readers care

There’s no room for throat clearing, for rambling on a bit, for extended world-building, or in-depth exposition, or even an involved description of the weather.

One of the key elements here is distinctiveness. Have you ever been in a situation where you are surrounded by voices, when you shop or eat or stand in a queue or sit in a park, or are part of a crowd. You can hear the bubbling hubbub of chatter around you. But then you hear one voice in particular, which rises out of the conversational mud. Why do you latch onto that voice?  I believe it is mostly about distinctiveness, some combination of pitch and pace, energy, mood, diction, syntax and rhythm, that compels you. Find that in your opening.

Also (because you don’t already have enough on your plate!) I’d argue the opening needs a sense not just of the status quo, but of something that’s going to change or develop. Something that will exert pressure on the rest of the story. Some hint (or more) of a complication or struggle or disruption.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. From a pragmatic point of view, the opening REALLY matters if you are submitting a story to a competition, a publisher, a literary agent, or anyone who is going to come to your work with a limited amount of time on their hands and plenty of other things to read.

So how do we make our openings more compelling? One simple, blindingly obvious when you think about it way is reading. Discovering great openings to stories and then - after enjoying the rest of the story - tearing that opening apart to find out how it all works. Reading is so often the key to better writing, and the study of story openings is no exception. When I find a great one, I will make the effort to study how it works, the techniques the author has employed to pull me into the story world. Then I squirrel it away for future reference. I have gathered an ever-growing collection of these. You might find that useful too.

Below are a few favourites. I thought it would be fitting to start with Alice Munro, a literary great who passed away this week. Her story openings are generally quiet and understated, but there is always something, a kernel of tension or ambiguity or interest that is enough to lightly hook the reader in.