The Opening Line

Every once in a while I work with people who say, “I don’t know how to start.” They want that first line—the one that will hook someone right away, the one that will establish their authority, wisdom, empathy, and razor sharp wit.

We all want people to see our genius and compassion right off the bat. We want to hold off on answering questions we’re not prepared for, too. Just trust me, we want that first line to say. It’ll be worth it.

Sometimes people wilt a little when I tell them to forget about trying to write a killer opening and release the most urgent idea instead. The killer opening is there, I promise: you just need to coax it out of hiding.

That most urgent idea may not be the first line, but it’s the first point of entry to find what has the power to carry a reader from beginning to end. I had to tell myself this exact thing just to get started this morning.

This is a space for not knowing where the hell you’re going yet.

Backstory

A couple of years ago I started a blog for my professional writing work that never really found its footing. As someone who writes fiction and has also spent a couple of decades writing for higher ed and non profits, I was trying to find a through line that would meld everything together. I wanted to seem both creative and “no nonsense”; I wanted to seem “serious” and playful at the same time, as if the idea of being both was ridiculous.

Note the words I put into quotation marks, as if I can’t claim them as my own. So I spent a lot of time dithering, not posting. This is me taking my own advice.

It turns out that I am both creative and no-nonsense, and either seriously playful and playfully serious. Working with me means you’ll get both. See below.

The Plot

• Playing, especially with language, is serious business. I believe you can do that in “creative” and “professional” writing. You can apply the same principles, you just use them toward a different end.
• Language isn’t about grammar and writing isn’t sacred. But the opposite can also be true of both.
• Your stories and memories and big ideas ? Those are sacred and should be handled with curiosity and care from the first tentative sentence to wherever you take them.
• Writing improves over time through experimentation and risk-taking, not by trying to get it right. It should be fun, but it should also be boring and challenging and frustrating. Like lifting weights. You build muscles by straining over and over again. You don’t see the benefits until later, but they’re still awesome.
• The glimmers coming off that idea you think isn’t ready to be shared are magic.
• Get comfortable making a mess. You’ll find stuff you thought you’d lost and you can clean it up later.
• It’s an honor whenever someone shares their writing with another person, and humbling when they allow people to offer their perspective.
• We need to write together more often. Writing can be solitary, and sometimes needs to be, but it should also be communal.

So that’s what we’re doing here. I hope you’ll join me.

Beyond this space, I work with people individually and in small groups and I’ll post that info as it becomes available.

Now, wait, there’s one more thing.

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The Last Word

One thing I tell people all the time is to find a sentence or a paragraph that blows them away and pick it apart, word for word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. How does it work? I’ll put something here to think about for each post and we’ll see how it evolves!

Underland, by Robert MacFarlane, is one of my favorite books of all time. I bought a copy for my husband, read it before him, and had to buy my own copy to take notes. The descriptions of the places he explores (glaciers, mines, underground rivers, caves, The Catacombs) are both beautiful and terrifying. The ideas he plays with throughout the book are fascinating.

This is only a glimpse of the eerie, evocative writing that held my attention. I had to look up a couple of words here, but I’m still in that forest, running my hand over the moss, watching the bee.

“Growl of roads. Whirr of a low-flying bumblebee, stirring the leaf litter with its downdraught. Buzzard overhead, turning, mewing. Old coppice trees left uncut, hydra-headed pollards. A fallen log, thick with moss; small orange fungi sprouting from wet breaks in its grain.”