How to Begin

In The Sydney Review of Books, Jane O’Sullivan takes a skeptical look at creative writing education and its prevailing wisdom: that a story must hook the reader immediately and reel them in like a fish. Moving through a wide range of first lines—from Robbie Arnott’s Dusk to Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel—she surveys how the writing advice industry’s fixation on immediacy and tension reflects a broader cultural anxiety about shrinking attention spans and an evolving publishing industry. Ultimately, O’Sullivan’s lovely piece is less a critique than a meditation: on what it means to ask a reader for trust, and on why reading—and writing—remain beautifully human acts.

Yet I do find it surprising – maybe naively – to see fiction-writing advice so reliably framed in terms of bait and resource scarcity. Seen this way, writing is a race against time. The readers are already leaving the room; if you are good enough, and also very lucky, you might catch one of the last. Part of what I dislike about this is how depressing it all is. Why bother, et cetera? (Though being an emerging writer is a bit like being six months pregnant. With the choice already made, you rely on ignorance and hope.) Mainly though, it feels like a very constrained picture of what fiction is and can be, and beyond that, what we can be to each other. When did we get so transactional and impatient about everything?