The overrated art of the lead

I taught writing for a couple of years, and I’ve been blogging for several months now -shifting in style, in the process, from an unread faux-professional music blog to a general unread blog about music and books- and I think, more than ever, that the punchy lead paragraph is an overrated concept. High-school students are still told to write them, and they shouldn’t be. Journalists are more likely to pull it off. Still,  I think it is vaguely magical thinking to imagine that any but the best or worst opening sentence will affect whether the article is read or not. Surely, unless the author is brilliant or terrible, the topic plays the biggest role.

If my subject doesn’t contain an obviously outstanding anecdote, these days, I just try to jump into the content as quickly as I can. For awhile, I tried to open with a “striking” statement of opinion, but since what strikes the writer and the reader may be very different, that meant trying to guess and directly address the reader. Some of my best writing is directly addressed to a reader, but that’s because I do some of my best writing in Emails and MySpace messages and IM. That’s different from addressing an infinite number of strangers as if all will share your careful judgement of what is a remarkable fact or hooky rhetorical question, which I think pulls you from the moment well enough that your style will stumble.

All of this will be truer for me than for you, as such things usually are. Some writers are great and effective producers of leads, but I don’t think enough people have that inherent talent for it to be the universal writing advice that it is. It’s like advising all writers to use simile heavily.