Catchy Introductions

 

Here are some examples of other catchy introductions that might provide inspiration for your own creative writing.

 

The trick to writing a good introduction is to avoid starting with the standard who, what, why, where and when. The reader will need to know this information eventually but they don’t need to know it all right away and often you are better off starting with something unexpected or dramatic to grab their attention; in this way, you can slip in character names and places almost as an aside while you are focusing on more interesting details.

 

Notice also how Marquez and Atwood have juxtaposed a dramatic event (death in both cases) with a very calm and matter-of-fact narrative voice. The narrator’s disinterest in the events they talk about piques our curiosity even more.

 

 

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going though a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling , and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.

 

Taken from ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

 

Six days ago, man blew himself up by the side of a road in Northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off.

 

Taken from ‘Leviathan’ by Paul Auster

 

 

Ten days after the war ended my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went straight through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine: smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.

 

Taken from ‘The Blind Assassin’ by Margaret Atwood

 

 

Every morning Mrs. Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast.  This consisted of two quick large brandies, followed by several slower ones.

 

Taken from ‘Mrs. Eglantine’ by H.E. Bates

 

 

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift waterway twenty feet below.  The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.

 

Taken from ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce