Readers and writers blog

In the newspaper business, the opening paragraph of a story generally is called the lead¹ — well, it’s still spelled ‘lede’ by some journalists, a usage supposedly started to avoid confusion with the metal, lead, which was what most newspaper type was cast in when I started in the business, and there was never any confusion even then, which is why I have steadfastly refused to misspell the word all these years, especially now that it seems just an affectation by bushy-tailed journalists and editors too young to remember when newspaper type wasn’t set electronically.

Whew, now that’s an example of a bad lead.

And now for some good leads — great leads, actually, not by journalists but by writers. The greatest lead ever written, for literary, theological, historical and other reasons way too long to get into here, is Herman Melville’s opening to Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael.

And anyone who has read The Metamorphosis will never forget Franz Kafka’s opening words:

As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

And then there’s:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’

The screaming voice, of course, is that of the narrator, Hunter S. Thompson, in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the bats, of course, are . . . well, you know the story.²

And now, I’ve got another lead for you, the opening to what is described as a novel. I don’t know if this lead is great, but it’s very, very good:

I’m using everyone’s real name. They can all sue me. I hope they do. I could use the excitement.

And the author, Gerard Jones, apparently does use everyone’s real name in his book, Ginny Good, which is subtitled A Mostly True Story and is described by Jones not merely as a novel but as a ‘nonfiction novel.’

What struck us not just about the lead and the book but about Jones as well is . . . you gotta like the guy’s attitude.

Well, maybe you don’t, but we do, and that’s why today we’re offering the first installment of Ginny Good. You can either click on this link, Ginny Good, Chapter One, or go through the nonfiction section under Works at the top right of this page.

As we said in our previous entry about Jones, the book is a chronicle of a classic 1960s love affair, and like everything from that decade and into the ’70s . . . well, it was just a different time, a time that a lot of us wish had translated more effectively into today’s world.

By the way, Jones also has issued Ginny Good in audio form, and you can find that, as well as the entire book in electronic print, at his website, Everyone Who’s Anyone.

Also today, after a week’s hiatus, we continue serializing Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel, The Unearthing, with Chapter Eight: Continuation and Contrast, in which a team of scientists learns more about an alien spacecraft in New Mexico and one of them gets an exciting ride in one of its satellite vehicles.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. But not always. Sometimes the lead is in the second or third paragraph, but that’s about the limit. Any deeper than that, the journalist is in danger of what is known as ‘burying the lead.’ Or ‘lede,’ if you must, o j-school grads.

2. Just in case you don’t, the bats are hallucinations produced by the aforementioned drugs.