From Medium:
When I was a little kid, I fell in love with a book and read it so many times that I nearly memorized the first page. Here’s the book’s opening line:
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
Do you know what book it’s from? It’s the first sentence of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White.
Now go back and read that opening line again. It really grabs your attention, doesn’t it?
It certainly grabbed mine when I was a kid. Just like Fern, I wondered why in the world her dad was heading out with an ax.
Was he going to chop down a tree or, heaven forbid, kill someone?
Shockingly, it was the latter. Fern’s mother matter-of-factly tells her daughter that Papa has to “do away” with the runt of a litter of pigs.
Well, that children’s book began on a dark note.
Of course, Fern ends up rescuing the little piglet, Wilbur, so thankfully the story didn’t traumatize me as a kid.
. . . .
What makes White’s introduction so powerful?
It all comes down to one essential ingredient: curiosity.
White uses curiosity like a magnet to pull us further into the story.
And that’s exactly how you want your readers to feel when they read the opening line of your article or blog post.
After all, you’ve spent hours pouring your heart and soul into that post. You’ve edited each paragraph until your eyes ached from staring at the computer screen. You’ve scoured the Internet for “headline formulas” and crafted one that you’re sure will grab readers’ attention.
But even the best headline won’t guarantee that when someone clicks on your article, they’ll stay on the page and keep reading. Your introduction has to further tighten the hold on their curiosity.
As William Zinsser observed in his book On Writing Well,
“Your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.”
Link to the rest at Medium
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”
Can opener’s broken and he thinks he can open the can with his ax …
(Stolen from a friend’s account on some of her father’s actual antics …)
I liked this opening better:
“That looks like your snotty, Senior Chief.”
The Marine sentry’s low-pitched voice exuded an oddly gleeful sympathy. It was the sort of voice in which a Marine traditionally informed one of the Navy’s “vacuum-suckers” that his trousers had just caught fire or something equally exhilarating, and Senior Chief Petty Officer Roland Shelton ignored the jarhead’s tone with the lofty disdain of any superior life form for an evolutionary inferior.
(start of ‘Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington’ by David Weber)