The Opening Paragraph
Your First Paragraphs Is Your Most Important Paragraph.
If you don’t get the readers attention with your first paragraph chances are you’ve lost them!
We’re living in a fast moving world people want answers NOW. Make the first sentence of your short story count. Begin with tension and immediacy.
Remember also it’s a short story you are writing not a novel so you haven’t that many words to play around with.
Here’s a great opening paragraph from Poe’s ‘A Tell-tale Heart’
“True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
In the very first sentence Poe has set the tone of the story and has told us a lot about the narrator. The first sentence leads you into the second and the first paragraph hooks you. You want to know more.
That paragraph is worth cutting out and sticking on your computer. Poe was a master of opening lines read him often and he’ll teach you.
Here’s my top five tips for the opening paragraph.
- Grab your readers attention and keep it. People who read short stories want a quick fix. Here’s something to keep in mind. Imagine your reader is travelling to work on a train and reading a magazine will your story grab their attention or will it be one of the other featured articles.
- Make your reader curious. So you’ve got their attention now you need to keep it and one of the best ways of doing that is by making the reader curious. What is wrong with the narrator – is he mad!
- Above all else to your own self be true. If your story is one that is subdued don’t treat your reader to a flash opening. You may draw them in with a great opener but if it’s not in keeping with the story then you’ve told your reader a lie. And it is difficult to trust liars second time around!
- Dialogue in the opening paragraph above Poe began with dialogue. It’s worth considering opening with a short piece of dialogue. People like to hear others speaking.
- Rewrite this is number five on my list but it is by no means the least important. Rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite. Can you tighten the opening paragraph up any; can you tidy the opening page up any? What would happen if you took out those ten words and substituted these six. No story, no paragraph is perfect first time around. Keep rewriting.
