Actually Good Advice, How Refreshing!
Just last night I was asked to write a chapter for a forthcoming book on philosophy and a specific phenomenon in popular culture, which was very nice. The truly amazing thing was the instructions for authors, a document written for the entire series. Now, I’ve written for a bunch of books, and I’ve seen a lot of these instructions. What made this different was the fact that instead of a stilted list of do’s and don’ts, this was highly intelligent and filled to the brim with smart observations regarding academic writing. Sometimes the world still manages to impress me. Just a short quote from it (note, this is remark 14 of part three (there are six parts, all with their individually numbered remarks)):
14. Begin in the middle!
Why do so many movies and popular short stories begin at one point in time, zoom back to an earlier point, then relate the events that happened in between? It’s to get you hooked. If the story were told chronologically, you might have to sit through a lot of not-so-interesting preparatory material before reaching a really fascinating bit, and by that time you would have lost interest. It works better to plunge into the middle, and then recount what happened earlier.
It’s just the same with writing nonfiction. Begin your chapter with something exceptionally interesting to the reader. Perhaps this will be an item that, if you gave a purely systematic exposition of your ideas, would occur halfway through your chapter, or near the end. Still, you should open with it.
Ideally, your job should be to guarantee that if someone reads your first sentence, they cannot possibly stop themselves reading the second, and then the third, and so on. That’s something few writers can come close to (Mencken could do it). But at least, use your first paragraph to wave something under your readers’ noses that will get them salivating.
Brilliant advice.
