My two writing classes today were focused on writing first sentences. I compiled a few resources to provide lens’ for examining all the first sentences they had written the previous week. From an article over at A Tate Publishing Blog, I pulled three criteria:
- excite a reader’s curiosity, particularly about a character or relationship
- introduce a setting
- lend resonance to a story
These criteria are the goals for an effective first paragraph, but I think any of them additionally apply to a first sentence. With my class, I broke setting down into three more distinct notions: time, place, and mood [which I discussed in a Heideggerian sense as our “being-in-the-world“]. The post then gives two questions to ask of a first sentence:
- Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about?
- Can you make it more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, something will surprise the reader?
Given my favorable disposition to Peter Brooks’ psychoanalytic treatment of hermeneutics, I chose to boil that second question down to “suspense”: does the first sentence pose a question we want answered?
From a creative writing handbook, I pulled two more criteria for evaluating good sentences:
- Flashes a picture in your mind, using concrete details
- Puts you right in the middle of something happening
Finally, I read the short article Killing the Babies and Captivating First Sentences” over at footnoteMaven with the class. I liked this article not only for its title, but also for its pragmatic advice. When revising, fM focuses on identifying the most compelling sentence in a piece, and then finds a way to “rock” that piece up to the very beginning of a document.
For non-academic writing instructors out there, this makes for an excellent exercise. Come to class with a document that contains every first sentence your students have written for a particular project. Have the students select their three favorites from the list; additionally, have them mark off the three sentences that need the most work. After tallying results, have students apply fM’s theory to whichever piece of writing received the most critical votes–can they, looking through the entire paper, find a compelling sentence that could be crafted into a more engaging opening? And, then, can they use this principle on their own writing?
A brief survey of the results showed the answers to such questions as positive. And, of course, I hope the critical attention such an activity fosters is applied to every sentence they write.
