And so it begins
Image: John Snyder via Wikimedia Commons cc
‘They threw me off the hay truck about noon.’
Author Stephen King cites this opening line from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice as a great example of how to begin a book.
As King says in his essay, part of the By Heart series published in The Atlantic:
This sentence tells you more than you think it tells you. Nobody’s riding on the hay truck because they bought a ticket. He’s basically a drifter, someone on the outskirts, someone who’s going to steal and filch to get by. So you know a lot about him from the beginning, more than maybe registers in your conscious mind, and you start to get curious.
When it comes to your own communications, you might not be able to spend the ‘months, even years’ that King does writing and rewriting the opening sentences of his books, but the lesson about having a strong opening still resonates.
Journalists and PR writers refer to a ‘pyramid structure’ for news articles and media releases, where the most important information (usually ‘who, what, where and how’) is contained in the first paragraph. If you want to ensure that your reader keeps reading, you need to get to the point quickly.
This holds especially true for web content—readers scan the page for information, and if they can’t find it they skip quickly to another site.
So although you might not be crafting the opening of one of the greatest pulp fiction novels of all time, it’s still worth spending some time thinking about those first words when drafting your next report, PowerPoint presentation or email.
