The Lead: Getting Your Reader Into the Story, Right Away

I especially love tabloids. I suppose that’s like the butcher confessing that his favorite food is fish. In a world that has become a little finicky and refined for my taste, a good tabloid isn’t. It stands up on its hind legs and shouts “Get a load of this!”

Anna Quindlan

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 though his mind as if it were a subway turnstile?”

Leads can be as short as a single word or as long as several paragraphs. Depending on the subject, audience, and medium, you will have more or less space to bring your reader into the story.

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.

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. Barry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, said he produced only songs that grabbed the listener in three seconds. 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.”

Leading Information

The Dale Carnegie Training program, which gives people in business strategies for speaking and relations with other people, requires students to deliver one- or two-minute “talks” every class meeting. Every talk uses the same formula: (1) “So there I was…”, (2) details about the situation, and (3) the moral of the story. By using this simple approach, Carnegie gives even the shyest and most awkward students the confidence they need to speak well.

The key, I think, is the opening statement. Every talk begins with the words “So there I was.” Those four words force the speaker to speak, specifically, about an event. Rather than getting lost in vague generalities, the speaker plunges into the middle of a meaningful situation—a car crash, a graduation, a moment with family or friends, an incident at work, and so on.

The best leads provide a preview of the whole piece. I call them “pregnant leads,” because they are about to give birth to a stoiry or argument full of life.

When you get in the habit of using this introduction, you will almost always put the reader in the middle of something worth caring about. One of the most successful popular novelists, Carl Hiaasen, use it to great effect in his work. Look at the opening lines of Skinny Dip:

At the stroke of 11 on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury desk of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic.

I married an asshole, she thought, knifing headfirst into the waves.

The impact tore off her silk shirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch, and sandals, but Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten.

Bobbing in the fizzy wake, Joey watched the gaily lit Sun Duchess continue steaming away at twenty nautical miles per hour. Evidently only one of the other 2,049 passengers was aware of what had happened, and he wasn’t telling anybody

Bastard, Joey thought.

In 133 words, Haissen tells us about the main character Joey (a sassy and smart tomboy, quick-witted), her husband (evil enough to throw her overboard), the scene (a luxury ship), and the focus of the novel (the likelihood of Joeyfighting back). The lead puts us in the middle of the action, using a little sex appeal to stoke our interest.

A good lead requires more than a tantalizing 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 288-page book, she has given us a cliffhanger that makes us want to read more.

In the old days, before 24-hour news cycles, reporters learned to present those 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.

Varieties of Leads

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 leads from recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize:

The Washington Post ‘s Gene Weingarten uses a fish-out-of-water image to show the public’s blasé attitude toward 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.”

Inviting the reader to become part of the storytelling, Julia Keller of The Chicago Tribune describes the swift 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 uses a man-bites-dog lead in The New York Times to describe the culture of New Orleans during the recovery from Hurricane Katrina: “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, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, treats the pervasive pollution of the oceans as a mystery, with all the suspense of a John Le Carre novel: “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.’”

Writing in the Baltimore Sun, Diana Sugg uses her lead to develop empathy for the problem of stillborn children, which only recently attracted the attention of scientists: “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.”

Finally, Eric Newhouse of the Great Falls Tribune in Montana evokes the power of smell to describe 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.”

Each of these leads puts the reader in a specific place. That place usually 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.

Leads lead us

The best stories begin in media res, in the middle of the story. enough has happened to put the characters in an intriguing position, but much remains to happen. A lead in media res produces a double mystery: How did the character reach this point? And what’s going to happen now? {OK?}

Ultimately, good leads provide direction to the whole story. 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.

Sit back for a few moments and read Gary Smith’s introduction to “A Delicate Balance,” 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.

When details tell us something important, they belong; when they offer mere ornamentation, kill ‘em. 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.”

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.