Introductions, whether to books or essays or articles, are notoriously hard to write. There are good reasons. An introduction, after all, is like the opening credits of a movie or the overture to a musical, meant to provide a preview of what’s to come in a way that entices the audience to stay for the whole thing. Step back from that task far enough to look at what that demands, and the reasons they’re hard to write are immediately evident. Luckily, so is a cure.
A preview of what’s to come implies that you in fact know what that is. You know who and what are involved, where they are, what they’re doing there, why they’re doing it. You have some idea of how they’re doing it, why they’re talking the way they talk and moving the way they move. Indeed, you know which problems your characters (or the actual human people you’re writing about, if it’s nonfiction) stumble into and what blind alleys they go down.
I sometimes tell clients “you have to know the dog’s name” before you can write the intro to something. It doesn’t matter if there’s not a literal dog in the piece you’re writing, there’s always something that occupies a similar role. You have to know the dog’s name. (It may be on a tag on the dog’s collar. Check there first.)
Knowing this level of detail usually means you’ve drafted a lot of, often all of, the manuscript. You have to, if you’re to know what is to come in your piece well enough to illustrate it for someone encountering it for the first time.
For some reason, writers often fall into the trap of thinking writing should happen in the same order their readers will encounter it.
This is exactly what most writers get wrong about introductions. For some reason, writers often fall into the trap of thinking writing should happen in the same order their readers will encounter it. This makes emotional sense, in a “begin at the beginning” sort of way. The problem is that from both functional and structural perspectives, it’s completely wrong.
Think about the overture to a musical — let’s say West Side Story. You know how the overture weaves in lots of the memorable melodies you immediately recognize when they show up later in the show? I’ll let you in on a little secret, as someone who worked with the late Leonard Bernstein a few times earlier in my life: Mister B did not sit down, crack his knuckles, grab a pencil, dream up a whole bunch of the hookiest riffs in all of American musical theater, jigsaw-puzzle them into an overture, and only then take all those memorable melodies and expand them into full-fledged songs as he wrote the rest of the show.
He did it exactly the other way around.
For exactly this reason, I very often get to the final few pages or paragraphs of a client’s manuscript and discover that I can take a highlighter pen and draw a huge glowing box around a sizeable chunk of text. Inside that glowing box, as I then proceed to show my client, is the introduction to their piece. They’ve written the whole thing, so they’ve discovered what the best bits are, the hookiest melodies, the most toe-tapping tunes. They have equipped themselves to write the overture.
Does this seem strange? It shouldn’t. Introductions and conclusions do similar, though not identical, jobs. There are reasons that one of the clichés used in teaching expository writing is “tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told ‘em.”
It makes perfect sense that many people write their introductions in the mistaken belief that they are writing their conclusions. After all, they’ve just gotten to the part of drafting the manuscript where they themselves know all of what was to come.
(It also makes perfect sense that in many cases, they are also forgetting to write their conclusions in the mistaken belief that writing an overview of what they’ve had to say is the same thing as drawing their conclusions. I’ll be writing about this problem in a different essay.)
Begin drafting with an introduction, sure. Just don’t bother trying to do it for the reader.
Instead of trying to write an introduction for the reader when beginning a project, I recommend a different strategy. When you start drafting, write an introduction for yourself, as a writer. Explain yourself to yourself. What are you trying to do? How are you trying to do it? What do you want it to achieve? Where are you trying to go with your thinking, your writing, and whatever ideas or arguments you want the reader to get out of what you’re writing?
Begin drafting with an introduction, sure. Just don’t bother trying to do it for the reader. Do it because being clear with yourself about what you’re attempting to do gives you a fighting chance of knowing whether or not you’ve done it by the time you get to the end.
Then, once you have done what you set out to do and completed a manuscript draft? Gently detach this “writer’s intro” from the manuscript and file it somewhere cozy and safe; you might want to consult it again. Wade right back in to your manuscript, head for the last 8-12 paragraphs or pages, and locate your introduction. There’s an excellent chance that it’ll be there, waiting for its field promotion to the front of the book, fully equipped with all the “what’s to come” it needs to do the job it was born to do.
As I am wont to say at such moments, “how pleasing when an obvious solution presents itself.”
— Hanne Blank Boyd
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