Don't waste the first words of your text

There are many ways to miserably spoil the first words: an ambiguous and imprecise title, a filler word, a foreign voice, a badly-chosen and misplaced word, empty and insubstantial words, a circumstantial complement without sense, endless bibliographic references (which should go at the end, not the beginning)...

Here, we’re playing with first impressions. Unlike us, the readers still don’t know anything about our work of literature. They can only work with what we’ve given them in those first words. So, we should ask ourselves: Is this the first thing the reader should see? Why do I want him to know this and not something else? What impression do these first words give the reader about the rest of the book (about its tone, direction, purpose)? What do I need to emphasize, and what do I need to place in a privileged spot? What do I want to make the reader feel so I can get him hooked enough to keep reading?

If you thought this kind of thought is only applicable to the first page of a book or a chapter, here’s a reason to constantly do this exercise all over the text: When a reader comes back to what he has already read, maybe to read back a key idea or to study (something typical of didactic academic works or those works that have to be read in an academic context), then he uses the first phrases in each paragraph as guides. If he can’t remember, with the help of those first five or six words, what the paragraph is about, the text becomes a dark jungle, with characters that are too similar to one another and are overused.

The usefulness of this method is not confined solely to creative or fiction writing. Non-fiction in particular, with the density of its contents and with how they can already be painfully tailored, should also try to make life easy for its readers, with a fluent, well-written text that makes the reader want to keep reading. I’m not saying it should be superficial, but it should be well-written. There’s a big difference.