Examples of crafting leads

I can read other people’s leads and select those I think are great and those that don’t work for me, but the rubber really hits the road when I have to create a lead myself. In addition, the only leads I know well enough to explain are my own. So I’ll try to explain a couple and hope we all don’t end up giving me 1’s out of 5.

Okay, Example 1:

My target audience for my book, Glitter of Diamonds, is people who like whodunit-style mysteries. A subset would be people who like baseball, but you don’t have to like baseball to like the book. You do have to like mysteries and not absolutely hate baseball.

This is what I wrote.

“Shouting in Spanish, pitcher Rico Velasquez stormed from the bullpen into the clubhouse lounge, where three players sat playing cards and watching the July holiday afternoon baseball game on a television monitor. Spotting an open box of new baseballs waiting to be autographed, Rico picked up one of them and threw a 90-mile-an-hour fastball into the middle of the television set.”

The questions I hope you are asking include: Who is Rico? Why is he so angry? Why are the other players afraid of him? What is going to happen next, both to Rico and to the other players? How will the team do this year?

I wanted my lead to introduce a major character. I wanted to show that baseball is a big part of the story (putting in enough baseball information so that a real fan will know I really do know baseball, without using language that a non-baseball fan would find off-putting - eg. anyone can figure out a fastball, but if I said “curveball” or “splitter,” I’d be in danger of losing potential readers by putting in too much lingo). I wanted to contrast the trouble gathering around Rico with the calm of the other players and the July holiday. And I wanted to foreshadow the trouble to come (e.g. using the word “stormed” into the clubhouse to foreshadow the “thunder and lightning” to come; having him throw the ball through the TV) .

Example 2:

My target audience for my book, Shaded Light , is also people who like whodunit-style mysteries. But this time there is no specific sub-theme going. A number of my characters are corporate lawyers, but that is only in the background.

I wanted my lead to introduce a couple of major characters, show a bit of the setting, and show that all is no well. I tried a number of different leads with different characters. This is what I ended up using:

“You self-righteous liar! But then you never think of anyone but yourself!” As Peter Martin stepped into the front hallway of his penthouse in an exclusive residential area of downtown Toronto, he was surprised to hear his wife’s angry voice. The voice he’d been hearing a lot lately. The one he hadn’t realized she possessed until several months ago. But this time she wasn’t speaking to him.

I hope you are asking, Who is Peter Martin and why does he live in a penthouse? Who is his wife? Who is his wife talking to? Why didn’t he know she could get angry? How long did Peter know her before they were married? Why has she been angry with Peter lately? What’s going to happen next? How long will this marriage last?

There’s also a degree of irony in the first line that the sophisticated reader might suspect - if anyone is self-centered, it is Peter’s wife.

Anyway, those are some of my leads and I think/hope they encapsulate the mood of the books and are true to the stories I tell.

What you should do is go back to a few of your leads and analyze them the same way: Who is your target audience? Is this lead perfect for them? What mood do you want to convey? Does your lead convey it? What questions do you want the reader to be asking? Does this make them ask those questions?

If you want to read the first chapters of these books, and see how I continued from these openings, you can find them both at www.murderwillout.com