Neither waffle nor a cold open

It's hard to write a good first sentence these days. Apologetic preemptory waffle is the reflexive post-traumatic response to having said, or even witnessed someone else say, something on social media that got picked up by reply guys, well- and ill-meaning scolds, and people who missed the point or just want to blog in your mentions. Reading a sentence like that is like watching someone cringe in anticipation of a blow. It doesn't stop the dedicated mis-reader and it makes the friendly reader feel bad, or worse, bored.

I'm not just talking about other people. I write those sentences and paragraphs, too. I write them, and then I delete them, and try to write something better. Sometimes the best way to resist the impulse to over-explain is to give in. And then delete that crap.

Ideally, I like a funny hook that makes people go "huh?" but in a fun way so they read more^[1]. However, I can't always pull it off, and frankly, sometimes it makes me feel icky to try. So how do I start?

Now, put on this song in the background while you read the rest: So May We Start

The ancient art of the cold open #

The Odyssey starts in medias res, in the middle of the story, which the Roman poet and critic Horace thought was the best place to start a narrative to draw listeners in. It's the OG^[2] cold open. The cold open works well if your audience already knows the topic--I would bet most people listening to poets reciting The Odyssey not only knew who Zeus and Athena and Odysseus were, but also knew a lot of the stories. It also works when the audience has enough shared context to pick up the narrative.

But when it's not a narrative and I can't count on the audience to have shared context? Tricky, tricky. Still, I don't want to write four preliminary paragraphs about the Industrial Revolution to introduce the concept of train travel to tell people about how difficult it was to navigate the train station mall in Kyoto to find unagi ekiben. On the other hand, it might help to talk about what ekiben is^[3].

The cool open #

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, a radio show on BBC4, is my model for the ideal introduction to non-fiction topics. Here's an example intro from the March 12 show:

"Hello, Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), was born to greatness, with her parents ruling most of Spain and her siblings marrying into the great royal families of Europe." Catherine of Aragon, March 12, 2025

Melvyn Bragg doesn't bother to warm you up with a personal story or explain why he's going to talk about the topic he's going to talk about. He just gets on with it. Here's another:

"Hello, if you've ever seen a mysterious white or yellow blob on your garden compost heap or on a fallen tree in the local park, you'll have come across slime mould. It's a single-celled organism that scientists have struggled to categorize." Slime Moulds, January 1, 2025

No hook, no joke, no snark, just the abruptness of a cold open leavened with a little light context setting, and then he introduces his guests and they get into the topic. The other thing that's great about In Our Time is that it's unafraid to tackle intellectually challenging topics. Science, biography, philosophy, literature, history--whatever the topic, it gets the same brusque intro treatment:

"Hello, on the 4th of May 1886, at a worker's rally in Chicago, somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman and the chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe. This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an 8-hour working day following a call for a general strike. The bomber was never identified but two of the speakers at the rally, anarchists, and six of their supporters, were blamed as inciting murder and four of them were hanged. The May International Worker's Day was created in their memory." The Haymarket Affair, October 30, 2024

I can hear Melvyn Bragg's voice in my head as I write or rewrite my intros to be more direct and less apologetic. Listen, if you don't want to know about slime molds, he seems to imply, I'm not going to tell you that you should care. It's a liberating way to write. The people who want to read my literary analysis of Twilight or a history of zucchini bread are going to read it and everyone else can come back next week when I'm obsessed with something new.

Conclusion #

My producer is going to come in now to offer some tea or coffee^[4], so that's it for today's rather meta blog post. Oh, and there's a reading list to go with it.^[5]