Most of the narrative non-fiction opinion pieces I read online do not grip me in the first sentence. People often start pieces somewhere sensible, but boring. Like the chronological start of a story.
two. “Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the questions of…”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.” A Sense of StyleStephen Pinker Here’s a good example of this from the opening of David Graeber’s book where he sets up a clear paradox: our technological advances should have led to fewer working hours, but they haven’t. Strange
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.” Bullshit JobsDavid Graeber
Fiction writers have it easy. When they hear that stories should start “in the middle of the action,” they can make it so. They can open with the main character’s feet dangling off the edge of a cliff with a fiery pit below (or something less heavy-handed and melodramatic). Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.
Your challenge is finding the compelling problem in your topic, and clearly presenting it up front. That problem might be deeply buried under a bunch of boring facts and informational details. It might be hard to figure out what it is, and hard to describe once you’ve found it. Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one.
Problems are a destabilising condition that has a cost for a community of readers that needs a solution. Destabilising condition is just a fancy word for “change” here – a change in the status quo. Put another way, a problem is an expected turn of events, that has undesireable consequences, for an audience who will care about it, that we want to explore solutions to.
Not every consumer tech problem poses a paradox that merits behavioral change en masse — and that gap matters. The problems that attract investment are the ones with clear destabilizing conditions, but many real problems in technology lack the dramatic framing that makes them legible as venture-scale opportunities. ecology-of-technologyDeveloping a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.
