7: Openings and Closings

First Lines and Paragraphs

The best revision workshop I ever attended began like this: the professor walked in and said, “Open your draft notebooks.” We wrote with actual pens or pencils in spiral bound notebooks in those days. “Now,” said the professor, “Cross out the entire first paragraph. What is left is the way you should begin your essay.”

Sure enough, in nearly every case, my second paragraph was significantly more interesting than my first. It began with some movement, some feeling. The first paragraph was a warm-up for the real stuff. Of course, if your first paragraph offers some important exposition, dismantle that and tuck it into later parts of the essay. But if you can begin with movement or some compelling emotion, that essay is better.

I always tell my writing students that the job of the opening sentence is to reach out and embrace the reader into the essay. The job of the closing sentence/paragraph is to slap the reader in the face so they walk away feeling it. I also tell them that I NEVER settle on my opening OR closing sentences until I have completed the rest of the essay and revised it a few times. That first sentence is usually the last aspect of the essay I refine, and sometimes it’s the very last piece of the essay I compose. This is where writing well in advance of deadlines can come in handy. Getting that piece written so it’s swimming around in your psyche, jumping through neurons, bumping about in your lexicon…you get it, but I’m having fun picturing this…it’s so helpful in the creative aspect of nonfiction writing. So many times, I wake up with the perfect first or last sentence jumping out of my mouth, and I must get it written immediately. This is also where the aforementioned “Storm Wall” idea comes in handy from our earlier chapter on brainstorming. I keep some sticky notes near my bed so I can scribble ideas as they occur to me and stick them right to the wall beside my bed.

Look through a publication of Creative Nonfiction magazine and collect a few first sentences in order to get a feel for your own best options. Take a look at these first sentences from a Best American Essays collection of 2017. Note how each one begins working toward an impression right away. They are all different lengths, different tones. Try a few different ways to begin your essay and workshop them with friends or classmates.

“There is a photo of you standing outside the house in Borough Park, grin wide, head back, laughing” (Resnick).

“If your body dies in Broward County, Florida, and nobody claims your body as the body of their next of kin, your body will be burned and disposed of by the Broward County Indigent Cremation and Disposition Program” (Notarnicola).

“These are banner times for penises on-screen” (Morris).

“Freddie Gray’s relatives arrived for the trial in the afternoon, after the prep-school kids had left” (Jackson).

Drawing the Curtain on Your Essay: Closing the Story

Here’s an interesting question: If you’re writing about yourself, and you are presumably still alive, how do you know when or how to end it when the story didn’t really end yet?

The best way to end a personal essay is to tell your audience what you make of the experience. Ballenger calls it the “So What” of the piece. He suggests asking yourself this question about an essay you’ve produced: “What I understand now about this that I didn’t understand then is…” (35). This generally addresses the answer to the “So What?” question Ballenger suggests answering.

For instance, if I were to continue the essay rooted in my inspiration from an earlier prompt in which I remembered my tendency as a child to ride cardboard boxes down staircases, so what? How did this habit play out in other aspects of my life? Did I do it because I enjoy taking risks, going fast, or crashing into cement walls? Was it a metaphor for my later choices, or did I learn what I needed to learn from my cardboard box experiences? A great way to end any essay is to make sense of your experience (or the experience of someone else) through your own current lens.

The UNC-Chapel Hill writing center delivers solid advice on concluding your essay. First, they reinforce Ballenger’s advice using the “So What” strategy. Tell your audience why they should care. Other strategies include:

• Save an especially cool insight or quote for the end. Don’t open a whole new topic, but hold onto some amazing words that synthesize the story you’re telling and slap them in that final paragraph.
• If you’re writing about a problem, suggest steps toward a solution or further investigation.
• Remind your audience of an image or action you used in your introduction. This strategy plays an exciting role in getting the audience’s brain to step back to the intro and replay your entire message.

Developmental Editor Katie Bannon observes that the conclusion is often where she sees a nonfiction essay, especially memoir, fall flat. Here’s what she suggests to keep your ending from feeling cliché or abrupt:

What’s most important for an ending is that the reader understands how the character of “you” has changed. That might involve an external shift—you’ve moved, ended a bad relationship, kicked an addiction—but most importantly, it should involve an internal shift – a deeper level of self-understanding than the character had at the beginning. While there should be a sense of resolution at the end, that doesn’t need to mean that everything is picture perfect. Tidy or moral endings often ring hollow to readers. The best endings leave us satisfied that there has been a change, without tying things up too neatly.

Other conclusion content to avoid…

• summarize your content (insulting to your readers),
• toss irrelevant information into the final paragraph (confuses the readers),
• give self-righteous advice (also insulting—let readers draw their own conclusion), or
• wait until the final paragraph to make your actual point (readers will have stopped reading by then if they don’t get what you’re trying to say)
• above all, no matter what, never, NEVER begin that concluding paragraph with “In Conclusion.” Your audience will understand that you’re ending the essay based on the cessation of text on the page.

Consider these closing paragraphs from some favorite essayists as you figure out how to wrap up your own creative pieces.

Here’s a concluding paragraph from a 2012 Atlantic article about tourist kidnappings in Egypt:

Shortly after my tea with Attwa, two more Americans and their guide were taken hostage. At first, this safari seemed different. The kidnapper, a 32-year-old truck driver, threatened to hold the hostages until his uncle (who he said had been arrested after refusing to bribe the police) was freed from prison. Four days later, however, he released them, unharmed. “We were treated just like they treat their own,” the hostages’ translator told a reporter. The kidnapper explained that in addition to the customary tea and coffee, he had served his guests roast lamb, a dish usually reserved for special occasions. He said his uncle remained in prison (Topol).

While the Topol article told an external-focused story, David Sedaris shared his experiences with European socialized medicine. Here’s how he ends his story:

I’ve gone from avoiding dentists and periodontists to practically staking them, not in some quest for a Hollywood smile but because I enjoy their company. I’m happy in their waiting rooms, the coffee tables heaped with Gala and Madame Figaro. I like their mumbled French, spoken from behind Tyvek masks. None of them ever call me David, no matter how often I invite them to. Rather, I’m Monsieur Sedaris, not my father but the smaller, Continental model. Monsieur Sedaris with the four lower implants. Monsieur Sedaris with the good-time teeth, sweating so fiercely he leaves the office two kilos lighter That’s me, pointing to the bathroom and asking the receptionist if I may use the sandbox, me traipsing down the stairs in a fresh set of clothes, my smile bittersweet and drearied with blood, counting the days until I can come back, and return myself to this curious, socialized care (Sedaris).