For years I wrote first paragraphs that explained what I was about to say, which is a little like a joke that begins by describing how funny it is.
Susan Orlean has a better idea. In her book Joyride, she writes that a lede doesn’t need to preview the story or summarize what the rest of the piece will be about. What’s important is that it captivates readers and holds them fast to the page so they keep reading.
The conventional wisdom about ledes is that they exist to tell readers what they’re about to read. The billboard theory of the opening. Here is what this story is. Here is why it matters. Here is what you’ll find if you continue. The lede as table of contents, compressed.
Orlean is saying something stranger and more honest: the lede’s job is not to inform. It’s to hold the reader.
There’s a distinction there worth sitting with.
Informing a reader is a transaction — you transfer content, they receive it. Holding a reader is something else entirely. It’s closer to what a magician does in the first thirty seconds of a performance, or what a stranger does when they say something at a party that makes you turn and face them fully. You haven’t learned anything yet. You’ve just been made to stay.
The ledes that have held me longest tend to have almost nothing to do with the stories they open.
Joan Didion begins “The White Album” with a single sentence — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — that takes the entire essay to even partially fulfill.
Gay Talese opens his Frank Sinatra profile not with Sinatra’s voice or his legend but with a man going silent: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing.”
Tracy Kidder opens The Soul of a New Machine not with computers but with a boat in a storm, Tom West awake for four straight nights while everyone else is seasick, the rest of the crew left wondering what on earth this man does for a living.
None of these ledes summarize. All of them hold.
What they share, I think, is a quality of disturbance. They’ve moved the ground slightly underfoot. Something is tilted.
Didion’s first sentence argues that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and you feel the vertigo in it immediately — wait, is that true? Is that a good thing or a desperate thing?
Talese gives you a man diminished by illness and silence, and everything that follows is measured against that diminishment.
Kidder’s boat goes somewhere that prose about minicomputers wouldn’t, and by the time you’ve crossed that dark water with West, you’re already a different kind of reader than you were on page one.
I think about this when I try to write.
I grew up reading ledes the billboard way — I thought the first paragraph was a promise about what the reader would receive. And sometimes I still write them that way, which is to say I write them first and delete them later, because they’re stage fright disguised as generosity. Here is what I’m about to tell you really means please don’t leave before I find my footing.
The Orlean formulation — captivate, hold, keep reading — shifts the pressure off the writer’s anxiety and onto the reader’s experience. The question is no longer what do I need to tell them? The question is what will make them unable to leave?
That’s a harder question. It requires knowing something about what people can’t resist. Strangeness. Motion. A body in trouble. A door left open. The suggestion that someone knows something you don’t.
The best ledes I’ve ever written didn’t come first. They came after I’d already written the whole piece and finally understood what it was actually about — which turned out not to be the thing I thought it was about at the start. You can’t write the sentence that makes someone stay until you know what you’re asking them to stay for.
The lede isn’t a promise. It’s a wager. You’re betting that the reader will follow disturbance into the dark — and the only way to make that bet is to trust the disturbance yourself first. Most of us don’t. Most of us write the billboard because we’re afraid that if we don’t explain what’s coming, the reader will leave.
But the reader doesn’t leave because they’re confused. They leave because nothing reached out and held them.
The explanation never does that. The strangeness might.
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