How Introductory Paragraphs Work in Creative Nonfiction

Thinking about how to start your story is as important as the story you tell.

While working at Powell’s City of Books, I had a routine. I would pull a story or essay collection from the literature shelves, read the first few paragraphs of every piece in it, then decide whether to buy the book. I did this for nearly six years.

As an introduction to a story, how does the above paragraph rate? In a single anecdote, it delivers a visible scene replete with action (shopping, reading, selecting merchandise), a narrator (me), some character traits (I worked at a bookstore, enjoy fiction, have a hard line philosophy, am possibly impatient) and a physical setting (the store’s literature section). Some of the five senses are absent ─ you can’t smell or hear anything ─ but the paragraph does pose a question in the reader’s mind: why did this narrator only read introductions? And what about those introductions determined his purchases? Unlike a more academic, thesis-driven introduction, the narrative places the reader alongside the narrator in order to lead into this essay’s topic, rather than only providing an abstract notion of that topic via exposition.

Though not quite as shallow as buying a book for its cover, I can imagine some people arguing that it’s unfair to base my purchasing decisions on such a small portion of a book’s total contents. What if each story picks up on its second page? Or fourth paragraph? Unfortunately, in a world of limited time and infinite reading…