Some Thoughts on Writing Leads
1. The lead can be seen as the most important paragraph of the story. If you write a bad lead, readers will quit reading and it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the story may be.
Here is an example of how I personally killed a great investigative piece that I had been working on for weeks with an astonishingly banal lead:
A recent fire inspection of Old Salem Apartments by Albemarle County authorities turned up 49 violations - some serious - of the county fire code.
- Wake me when the place blows up.
2. Be short. The classic test is to see if you can say everything you need to say in 14 words. This is rarely possible, and shouldn’t be tried at home, but it is an interesting test and a worthwhile goal. Take any story in most major newspapers and count out 14 words. Put a period there. A good lead should stand on its own at that point as a sentence and should at least give you a pointer about where the story is going. Try it. It is surprising how often it works (in reality, almost any lead worth reading will be longer than this, 20 or 25 words at least, but it is a worthwhile game).
Here are some very short ones that worked for me:
Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett is in Congress by accident.
-Profile of a very strange Maryland congressman.
At least someone at the White House has nothing to worry about.
-This is a bit of a throwaway, but it worked reasonably well since the story was about the frightfully dull tradition of the presidential pardon for a turkey at Thanksgiving. This is all I could think of to spice it up, since it happened while Clinton was facing impeachment and many of his staffers were facing subpoenas, indictments, and ruined careers
3. Brief is good, but don’t get hung up on length. If the lead needs to be longer to really develop the theme or catch a reader’s eye, go with it. Just make sure it is interesting.
For 2 ½ years, Montgomery County taxpayers paid for the personal telephone calls made by public employees – including lengthy calls to sex line in the Caribbean – because an agency director did not replace broken equipment designed to prevent such abuse, The Washington Times has learned.
- This one won me a nice SPJ award, and $500 to boot. Who says good writing can’t pay off.
4. Writing a lead is like flirting – be interesting, be coy, perhaps even mysterious. Don’t be boring, don’t be overly cute or pompous, and for God’s sake, don’t be deceptive. It works at first, but it will come back to haunt you later.
5. When in doubt, be straightforward. There’s nothing worse than an overwritten or unclear lead when a simple, direct, declarative sentence will do.
The House yesterday voted to kill a package of new gun-control regulations, setting the stage for a fierce political battle to pin the blame for the collapse of the bill after three grueling days of debate.
One man is dead and Greene County Sheriff Will Morris is hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds after an apparent domestic incident turned violent Monday morning.
6. Ignore the technical details and jargon and focus on what the story means to the reader. Include facts and figures to which a reader will relate, such as the cost to the average taxpayer or a metaphor that gives some sense of scale.
Montgomery County taxpayers paid $15,000 to buy an official government spectator box at the Kemper Open – but most of them weren’t invited.
- A story about the County Executive’s decision to spend tax money on a party tent at a major PGA golf tournament.
The residents of Puerto Rico cannot vote in the presidential election, but they have more influence over who is on the ballot than residents of 27 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
- A story about the disproportionate influence of the Puerto Rican delegations at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
7. Don’t be cute unless you can still tell the exact story. There is a grave temptation to simply slap on a cute little throwaway lead that might get a chuckle but is really meaningless. Such leads wind up stinking:
Montgomery County is trying to live by a rule every kindergartener learns: if you make a mess, clean it up.
- Says nothing, right? The real lead was paragraph two, a nut graph that should have been the lead if I had been thinking:
This spring, Montgomery County will spend $350,000 to clean up the salt and sand that cost at least $800,000 to lay on the roads during the snow and ice storms over the winter.
-Truth be told, I had oversold the story to the editors, who wanted to put it on A-1 after hearing my one sentence summary, but I didn’t have any good quotes or figures beyond the paragraph above to make the whole story a good read. So I slapped the cruddy kindergarten lead to make the story seem lame and get it buried deep in the paper. And it worked.
8. Let the facts of a story speak for themselves. There is no need to inject humor or drama into a story that is inherently dramatic or funny (sometimes dramatic and funny).
The Montgomery County Council yesterday voted unanimously to remove Ruthann G. Aron from the county Planning Board because she is unable to discharge her duties while in jail on charges of trying to kill her husband and a lawyer.
Sen. Robert C. Smith meekly returned to the Republican fold yesterday, 111 days after he angrily denounced the party as “hypocritical” and calls the party platform a “meaningless document” written for “suckers.”
9. If you know all of your competition is going to do a certain type of lead, try to do something a little different.
Rep. Joe Knollenberg wants to free Americans from lives of feeble showers and multiple flushes.
- This was about a congressional hearing on banning the hated “low-flow” toilets and showerheads. Everyone else in the world led with some variation of “the House is considering whether to flush low-flow toilets.” I argued bitterly with the deputy national editor over using this very lead and I won only after I threatened to withhold my byline.
Assorted leads I liked:
At 77, Rosa Seay says she’s a pretty quick thinker. And in the early hours of Friday, quick thinking saved her life.
- A story about an old lady who saved herself from her burning house by punching through a storm window and pulling herself to safety.
It’s not hard to pick out Alan Agins, Ph.D., in the lobby of the University of Virginia Hospital - he’s the one in the clown nose.
- About an out of work academic who decided to fill his time by applying his clown skills to entertaining patients at a hospital. Nobody I know likes this lead or this story, but it has always been a favorite of mine.
After years of thinking big, Montgomery County officials have decided to think small with the latest plan to redevelop downtown Silver Spring.
- A story about a modest plan to redevelop this suburban area, unveiled a year after the collapse of a spectacular and garish plan to create the second largest shopping mall in the nation on the same spot.
Most of Gen. Stonewall Jackson is buried in Lexington, Va. The rest of him is buried more than 100 miles away, on a windswept hill in a nearly forgotten corner of rural Central Virginia.
A lead that seemed like a good idea at the time:
Fire seared a hole in the heart of historic Annapolis on Tuesday and may have burned a mark in its soul as well.
- This is a cheap throwaway lead, designed to impress the easily led, but which really tells you very little. And the story doesn’t support it very well either.
Questions? Comments? Contact Me: SPScully@seanibus.com