Person on the Page

No one wrote more provocative first lines of poems than Emily Dickinson.  Who could read an opening line such as I felt a Funeral, in my Brain or I heard a Fly buzz—when I died and not feel compelled to read on? 

When we write introductions for personal essays, our impulse may be to rely on what we were taught in school about essay writing: that introductions should reveal our topic, provide a forecast of the essay’s development, and include a thesis statement.  You remember, right? 

However, when writing a personal essay, as opposed to the academic kind, a more organic beginning may better achieve your purpose. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was probably the first to distinguish between a mechanical writing form, one that relies on arbitrarily established rules, and an organic form, one that arises out of the material from which it is created: the writer’s consciousness and the subject itself.  In other words, rather than adhering to arbitrary writing rules, we should allow the subject itself and our own encounter with it to influence the form. 

Popular college composition parlance tells us that we should begin an essay with a hook, or that we should grab the reader’s attention with our first sentence. While the importance of engaging our readers immediately in an essay is unquestionable, I feel uncomfortable with the idea that as a reader I must be grabbed or hooked into reading. 

Why not rather envelop our readers with our subject and our writing selves, drawing them into the midst of the essay’s subject as if they have entered an ongoing conversation or stepped into a scene that is already underway?   

Notice Dickinson’s poetic first lines above.  Beginning with I felt and I heard, she places her poetic persona at the entryway into the poem, letting readers sense that a knowable personality will be speaking the subsequent lines.  And what does this persona feel and hear?  A funeral, a fly buzz. Dickinson surrounds her readers with a recognizable scene or situation immediately, drawing us into the persona’s experience from the beginning of the poem.

Personal essays can accomplish the same effect on readers if their introductions arise organically from the self and the subject. Invite your reader into the midst of the matter.  Don’t feel obligated to obey what might be firmly instilled mechanical rules for writing introductions.   Allow your readers a more natural entry into the world of the essay.

Consider these masterfully designed first lines of well-known personal essays. 

I’ve been trying to lie about this story for years.

                        Peter Orner, “Writing about What Haunts Us”

If you were passing by the house where I grew up during my teenage years and it happened to be before Election Day, you wouldn’t have needed to come inside to see that it was a house divided.    

                        Sarah Vowell, “Shooting Dad”

First, try to be something, anything, else.

                        Lorrie Moore, “How to Become a Writer”

A weasel is wild.  Who knows what he thinks?

                        Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”

Remember these when you are writing your next personal essay, and you ponder, Where to begin?  Let your introduction emerge organically. Engage your readers from the start.