Where to begin?

The telling magic of an opening sentence.

WAY BACK WHEN, I developed a proposal for a nonfiction book that attracted offers from four publishers. My agent got them bidding against each other, and the advance reached six figures. When I signed a publishing deal, I quit my job (magazine editor in Toronto) and devoted myself to researching the story. I had sixteen months to produce a manuscript.

The proposed book was about a precocious young banker who was also a compulsive gambler. Starting with a “weekend loan” to himself while the branch manager was away, he went on to lose many millions of the bank’s money, mainly at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and Caesars Atlantic City. He was finally tripped up not by the bank, but by a Toronto cop who happened to be wiretapping one of Brian’s bookies.

I visited key locations and talked to people in Nevada, New Jersey, New York state, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and in and around Toronto. After collecting mountains of research—legal documents, procedural manuals, tape recordings, transcripts, scribbled notes, reference material—I was confident I had the makings of a decent book.

Just one problem: I had no idea where or how to begin. Should I tell Brian’s story chronologically? Start with his early life? That felt wrong—I needed to jumpstart the bank fraud. Brian’s early years and upbringing could be feathered in along the way. So too descriptions of bank procedures, the nature of addiction, and the ways casinos empty people’s pockets.

Start with the ending?—his arrest as he drove home from the airport at dawn, back from Atlantic City on a private jet? I recalled another writer’s manuscript I’d worked on in which my edit consisted mainly of suggesting we move his first chapter—the climax of the story—to the end of the book. (Saboteurs, happily, went on to win the Governor-General’s Award for Non-fiction.) Same issue with this story, I imagined—how, without more artistry than I felt capable of, to build back to a climactic ending that the reader already knows?

I also wondered about drawing two separate characters in chapters one and two, switching back and forth between B.P. Molony, conservative banker in Toronto, and Mr. M, fervid high-stakes casino gambler, before merging them mid-way through the book. Surprise!—it’s the same guy! When I played around with the idea, though, it seemed gimmicky and tough to pull off.

Time was wasting. Morning after morning I’d go upstairs to my office, coffee in hand, and fart around. I’d done all this research and now, day after day, I’d watch the kids file into school across the street, then spill out for recess a couple of hours later. I had stuff piled all over my desk and no idea where to wade in. It became incredibly frustrating.

Visiting family in Vancouver, I happened to pick up a book my father was reading, African Genesis, by Robert Ardrey. The author’s thesis was that mankind did not originate in Asia, as long believed, but rather evolved on the African continent. I can’t remember whether I finished the book, but I’ll never forget the opening sentence:

“Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.”

IN THAT BRIEF, elegantly poised line, Ardrey signals the vast scope and intent of his book. Somehow, the sentence released the bind I was in. I needed an opening that would instantly signal the opposing poles of Brian’s life, an inherent tension that I could ratchet up all through the book. The sentence I came up with was this:

Molony worked late at Bay and Richmond, locked the doors, and drove to the racetrack.

Now, I don’t pretend that it compares with Ardrey’s gem, but it got me off and running. I took the reader along with Brian to the track, and a rendezvous with his gold-chained bookie. Things fell magically into place. I’d fall asleep puzzling over a structural problem and wake up with the solution. I delivered Stung on deadline and it did well. Fifteen years later—after many false starts­—it became a Philip Seymour Hoffman movie. I didn’t mention Robert Ardrey in the book’s acknowledgements, but I should have.

I’VE ALWAYS paid close attention to the first sentence of whatever I’m writing or reading. When I pick up a book or start a magazine piece, I can often tell early on—sometimes from the first sentence—if it’s going to be any good. An opening sentence either captivates you or it doesn’t; it invites, even compels, you to keep reading, or it lets you off the hook.

In a recent New Yorker I came across a piece that begins as follows:

The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in the Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder.

Who could resist? The piece turned out to be more cleverly timed than engrossing, and it had been too-carefully sanitized by the magazine’s editors, but I read it all the way through because of that opening.

It put me in mind of other New Yorker pieces I’d read over the years, with first sentences I can still quote. “The Possibilian” is about slow-motion accidents, the rhythmic precision of musicians, the many ways the brain interprets time. It begins with this:

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling.

Janet Malcolm’s classic article, “The Journalist and the Murderer,” opens with a sentence that surely rattled around in the head of every journalist who read it:

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

Hunter S. Thompson’s two-part article in Rolling Stone, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” promised in its first sentence all the gonzo chaos it would deliver:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

BOOKS, TOO, can propel the reader forward with an opening line. Sometimes the simplest language conveys the richest possibilities. One such opening that stayed with me is from a Carson McCullers novel, published when she was just 23:

In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.

—The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Twelve words, ten of them one syllable. For me, that line captured the acuity of the southern writers I’d read to that point (Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy). There’s something irresistible in the confluence of history, tradition, and religion that flows through their work; the delicacy of sensibility; the eccentric characters; and that plain diction, so well chosen.

I read both Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch long after I’d pretended to do so at university. I read them more out of literary duty than desire, and was not really expecting to be drawn in, but I found both novels seductive from the very start.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

—Jane Austen

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

—George Eliot

I can also quote the first sentences from two novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the first engraved in memory by the reference to imminent death, the second by the promise of an ill-fated love story:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

—One Hundred Years of Solitude

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

—Love in the Time of Cholera

CLOSING SENTENCES can have a similar magic, and I always turn to a book’s final page after I’ve read the opening line. I can’t say how often I’ve stood in a bookstore, picked up a title, read the beginning and the end, and either waded in or put it back down again. Snap judgement, perhaps, but it’s a deeply entrenched habit that has mostly served me well.

I can recite the close of The Great Gatsby, though I can’t say whether I’m recalling it from my first reading, for an American Lit course, or from the many times I’ve since seen it quoted:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Final sentences can sound a note that makes an entire novel, and your own brain stem, crackle. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale seemed more like science fiction than prophecy when I read it in the 1980s, but the last line never left me:

“Are there any questions?”

In another novel I admired, the final sentence bathed an entire multi-generational family in a soft light that illuminated all the conflict and hardship and tragedy they’d endured. I don’t think I’ve ever read as elegant a thematic summation as the line that closes Alistair MacLeod’s gentle masterpiece, No Great Mischief:

All of us are better when we’re loved.

IT’S WORTH paying special attention to the first and last sentences of whatever you write. Be deliberate in welcoming readers to your party, and show them graciously out when it’s over. Often, those two moments signal the quality and character of all that lies between. Sometimes they contain multitudes. The best don’t let you forget them.