Friday Five: grand openings

One lesson the professors at journalism school drilled into my head was the importance of crafting a compelling first paragraph (aka the lede in news parlance).

The opening paragraph is the most important element of your story. It must grab readers’ attention and get them to read more, so it must be finely crafted and honed to its sharpest possible point.

The same applies to more literary writing–whether a novel, a short story, or a creative nonfiction essay. These five opening sentences from some recent stories and essays do a good job of hooking the reader. Each example below comes from The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. And while there are other notable pieces I could have pulled from this anthology, I chose these five because they are great and because you can also read them online, for free.

After each example, I offer a writing prompt for your consideration.

1. The allusion

In her essay “Alone with Kindred,” Farah Peterson begins with a single-sentence paragraph, much as a reporter or feature writer might, and draws the reader in with a strong allusion:

My family didn’t approve of Eugene, my future husband, and not because of the content of his character, which my father summarized after our first dinner together as “smart, interesting, and competent.”

The phrase “the content of his character” alludes to Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. (“I have a dream,” MLK Jr. said, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”) Borrowing from this powerful and widely recognized speech, Peterson, who is a law professor as well as an accomplished essayist, immediately connects the reader with a well-known phrase and employs it in a different context. Her opening also suggests that the essay might have something to do with racial issues at a very personal level.

By alluding to MLK’s speech, Peterson made me want to read more about her relationship with her husband. But she went beyond the personal to discuss the scarcity of literature about interracial marriage in the twentieth century. Centering her essay on Octavia Butler’s fantasy novel Kindred, Peterson examines how that work is one of the few to “imagine how one of these marriages would work in practice.”

“Alone with Kindred” was published in Fall 2023 issue of The Threepenny Review.

Prompt idea: Consider starting your next essay or other piece with an allusion to some well-known work, be it a speech, a novel, a work of art, a movie, or something else.

2. A glimpse at characters

“Just This,” a short story by Pamela Painter published in Winter/Spring 2023 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, immediately introduces us to three characters that would figure prominently–some more than others–in the first-person narrator’s story:

Big Betty who lived one farm over from ours came by to tell my mom and me Mr. Antonio was looking for a counter girl for the summer.

In just 28 words, Painter introduces us to four characters: the narrator (presumably a teenaged girl, old enough to work a counter), the narrator’s mother, Mr. Antonio (who, it seems, owns a business of some sort), and Big Betty. We also get a hint of the setting: the story takes place somewhere in rural America, where people lived on farms but apparently close to a town.

In the next sentence, we learn Big Betty works at “Antonio’s Trattoria” as a waitress–“she was still wearing her pink apron”–but continues to farm (she would “soon change into overalls and boots to feed her three remaining hogs”). But we also learn the farms are in Pennsylvania and “weren’t farms anymore.” Painter describes these homesteads as “just the remnants of tilting grain towers, empty door-less barns, and split rail fences sagging like hammocks.”

The opening paragraph sets a neat table on which we can feast on a short story that is beautifully written and memorable.

Prompt idea: Consider opening a short story by introducing some of the story’s main characters.

3. A strange, unsettling image

Some of the best short story openings startle us with their off-kilter view of the world. The best of these are told in a straightforward manner, like “Good Medicine,” by Sophie Hoss, which begins:

After my father died in the mine shaft, they left his body on our front yard next to the white roses.

Obviously, this was not an ordinary day. But the writing is so matter-of-fact it makes the disruption of everydayness even more disruptive. The second sentence continues this contrast of ordinary and unexpected: “The milkman stepped over him to drop our bottles on the stoop and rapped on the door for my mother: Ma’am, there’s something you should see.“

The first sentence gives us a sense of place–the narrator’s home, where there are white roses in the yard–while second sentence gives us a sense of time–the era of milkmen making home deliveries. Reading on, we learn the narrator was four when this incident happened, and is now recalling it later in her life. Hoss builds on the memory to flesh out a haunting story of memory, trauma, family, death, and a pet canary.

“Good Medicine” was published in The Baffler, November 24, 2023

Prompt idea: Consider taking an offbeat or unusual approach to introducing a short story. Try to ground it in the ordinariness of daily life, but give it a twist that will make the reader want to explore more.

4. The summary

In her essay “Church of the Goat Man,” Kathleen Driskell (Kentucky’s Poet Laureate) offers an excellent example of the summary lede. It not only communicates information in a succinct, direct way, but in this case, Driskell compels us to read on.

The Goat Man has his own Facebook page, Wikipedia page, short movie, entry in the Encyclopedia of Louisville, and is the subject of several poorly produced podcasts I have listened to recently.

Driskell chose carefully which elements of the Goat Man’s existence to present–specifically, elements of his public persona, from social media and Wikipedia to “several poorly produced podcasts” (a lovely bit of detail). If that opening doesn’t entice you to learn more about the Goat Man and his church, then I don’t know what else I could write here to change your mind.

“Church of the Goat Man” was published in River Teeth, Spring 2023

Prompt idea: Consider using a summary introduction for a short story or essay.

5. Setting the scene before the kicker

We’ll end this Friday Five with the longest opening paragraph of all the examples, but it’s a doozie. Here’s the intro to Austin Smith‘s flash fiction piece, “Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”:

On the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, in Our Lady Consoler of Farmers in Black Earth, Illinois, in the lull during Mass when the wicker collection baskets were being reached down the pews on their long poles, and the aging choir was singing tremulously the hymn “O Jesus, I Have Promised,” and people were distractedly peering into their wallets and purses and watching sidelong to see what their neighbors were putting in, and Father Jeffries had closed his eyes as if to listen more deeply to the music but really to take a brief nap, while all this was going on, the Christ above the altar began to come alive.

In this story, Smith uses a run-on sentence punctuated by ands to set the scene. He mixes dry facts (the name of the church, its location, the title of the hymn) with choice details–the collection baskets are wicker, the choir aging–culminating with the description of Father Jeffries sneaking a nap during a lull in his ministerial duties. Then comes the kicker–the transubstantiation of the statue of Christ–and now we have some idea of what this story is going to be about, and that this will not be the normal mass.

“Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time” was published in Image: Art Faith Mystery, Issue 118.

Prompt idea: Consider setting the scene of your story with sensory details, then closing that introduction with a kicker that sets the stage for what happens next.

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So there you have it: five examples of great–even grand–opening sentences. Tell me what you think of these in the comments, and feel free to share your own favorite examples.

Image via Pexels.