From the course: Writing with Impact
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Grabbing readers' first five seconds
From the course: Writing with Impact
Grabbing readers' first five seconds
- "One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from a fit-filled, "dream-filled sleep, he found that he had changed "into an enormous insect." That's the first sentence of one of the 20th century's most famous works of fiction, The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. Immediately, we want to know more, so we keep reading. We're intrigued by this very first sentence. People deciding whether something's worth reading only have a few seconds. If you don't give them something juicy and relevant, if you bury the lead, as journalists say, there's a good chance that readers will give up before they get to it. Put another, a knife's quality doesn't matter if the cutting edge isn't sharp. Here are some ways to make sure that they stay with you. Try doing something different from what the reader expects. That's what our example does. The first few words seem very normal, and then we get shocked with the image of a giant insect. Start in the middle of the action. You see this in movies all the time, the scene…
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