Opening Paragraphs Matter

The opening paragraph is among literature’s most important gestures, or like the fly fisher’s fly line and crafted lure, imperative to netting her catch, in this case, the reader.

Exemplars of this refined craft are many: the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Orwell’s 1984, and not least, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, spring to mind. I’m sure you have your own favorite.

Surprisingly, my favorite opening comes from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a non-fiction classic latent in its prelapsarian beauty, resonance and relevance, an America of pristine promise in its unspoiled abundance. She caught me in her cast:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. 

If I were still teaching a college composition course, I’d likely point out the opening’s rich, visual detail. When it comes to description, abstractions won’t suffice. Good writers, ever mindful of their readers, seek to gain their readers’ attention, employing the sensory, i.e., taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing. Take, for instance, Carson’s choice of “checkerboard,” to achieve concreteness and economy.

Good writing, action-centered, selects its verbs adroitly for the sensory and kinetic (movement): clouds drift, “oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered,” “foxes barked” and “deer silently crossed the fields.”

Among still other things, I’d emphasize the paragraph’s unity and varied sentence structure, lending ambience.

Superb openings like this don’t just happen. They are wrought through multiple revision.

Carson’s opening paragraph, prescient in its parabolic foreboding of a lost Eden, initiated a lasting awareness in me of nature’s frailty amidst human assault. It changed the way I live my life, to do no hurt to Nature that gave me birth and sustains me.

—rj