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?
More picks on writing
The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt
“Historians and nonfiction authors often glide over lived experience. They prefer actions, citations, details, dates. But I had just gone through something primal—something beyond my control and beyond the boundaries of modern life.”
Masking My Autism Made Me Sick
“The rules dictated that I hide not only my sensitivity but my essential being in the world.”
Thinking in the Margins
“What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.”
A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half’
“Typescript drafts on view in the newly opened archive reframe the horror maestro’s relationship with his alter ego, Richard Bachman.”
Tom Junod Finally Reckons with What It Means to Be a Man
“In a long list of classic stories, the legendary magazine writer helped teach readers what masculinity looks like in the 21st century. To write his first book, he had to confront the man who first taught him: his father.”
Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?
“If only they were robotic! Instead, chatbots have developed a distinctive—and grating—voice.”
