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,
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
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
Taken from ‘An Occurrence at