Day 5: Find the angle “A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Key point: you can’t say everything at once – you need an angle The way you start a piece of writing sets the direction for the whole thing. Consider the first sentence in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: ‘The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.’ Or Seth Godin’s introduction to Small is the new big: “You’re smarter than your boss or your friends or your organization believes.” Big, bold, beautiful sentences. The opening sentence is the reader’s invitation to the party. You have to get it right or else you’ll spend the evening staring at a big room eating hors d’oeuvres on your own. American journalists call them ‘ledes.’ Donald Murray, a Pulitzer winner, says that you should write 50 different ledes and then pick the best one. Today’s exercise is to come up with 50 different ledes (or opening sentences) for the story you worked on yesterday. Or, if you prefer, you can take a story from a newspaper or a piece of news from your own company and write alternate ledes for that. It’ll be a challenge, but the exercise will help you explore all the dimensions of the story. You may not need to write 50 every time, but learning to write different ledes will help all your writing in future.
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