updated lede presentation, intermediate nonfiction 2015

1. Ledes
Also known as leads. Also known as “the beginning of your
story”

2. In the Beginning
• A strong beginning draws in the reader and holds the reader.
• It’s the hook, prime real estate
• Every story has multiple possible points of departure. Trying
out different ledes will help find the best path forward.
• The lede sets up expectations for the rest of the piece, and
should propel the reader to continue reading.
• The lede can be the first sentence, the opening paragraph—
it’s essentially the “start.”

3. Some options
• News-breaking summary: best for news-breaking & time-sensitive stories
• Compression of entire story—laying out all the points that will be covered
• Scene-setting/description/image
• Blind/Tease
• Anecdote
• Provocative question
• Quote
• Personal

4. Newsbreaking
• Alabama became the latest state to allow same-
sex marriage Monday, as many probate judges
defied an order by the chief justice of the Alabama
Supreme Court and began issuing licenses and
performing weddings.—New York Times Feb. 9,
2015

5. The whole story in the lede
• Less than a year has elapsed since Oxford
Dictionaries declared “selfie” its word of the year for
2013, and though many people regarded selfies as an
art form long before that the time has clearly come for
formal recognition. Visionaire, a publisher that
produces pricey limited editions (which it calls issues),
is devoting its current issue, Visionaire 64, to works by
the conceptual artist John Baldessari, who has used
celebrity self-portraits provided for the project as his
raw material.
• —Ibid, NYT, Oct. 21

6. Blind/Tease/delayed ID
• No human being has caught it in New York City for at least a
century, but still, there it was, researchers said, in places
touched by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people every day.
• After swabbing more than 400 subway stations for all kinds of
microorganisms, researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College
reported this week that they had found evidence at points
across the city of bubonic plague, the Black Death that ravaged
14th-century Europe.
• —New York Times, Bubonic Plague in Subway System? Feb 8,
2015

7. Setting the scene
“Late last month, above a pho restaurant on Grand
Street, a group gathered around a life-size cutout of
Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of “The Hunger
Games,” outfitted with wings, body armor, and the face
of Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from
Massachusetts. This was the inaugural meeting of
Artists for Warren, a progressive answer to Prayer
Warriors for Sarah Palin and Yoopers for Rand Paul…”
—”The Artist Vote, Feb. 16, 2015 issue of The New
Yorker,

8. An image
“Passersby of the Standard hotel on Manhattan’s
Washington Street will encounter an inflatable rainbow
structure of indeterminate shape, beginning this week.
At night it lights up like an alien pod that’s just set
down from a planet located in the artist James Turrell’s
high-school locker.”
—”What Is That Glowing Orb in Manhattan’s Meatpacking
District?”, Vanity Fair, September, 2014

9. Scene in first person
• “It is one of those perfect Colorado mornings — the
sky a brilliant cerulean stretching for miles over a
rough-and-tumble landscape of high desert and red
rocks, the blue snow-capped peaks of the Rockies
barely visible to the east. I am descending the high
bluffs above the Colorado River just west of Hot
Sulphur Springs, decked out in hip waders, determined
to improve my fly-fishing game.”
• —Feb. 5, 2015, Washington Post, “For the Quieter
Side of the Rockies”

10. Anecdote or storytelling from
an interview
He wakes up, and even before he opens his eyes, he can see his beautiful, delusional son.
Gus, Creigh Deeds thinks.
He lies in bed a few minutes more, trying to conjure specific images. Gus dancing. Gus playing the banjo. Gus with
the puppies. Any images of Gus other than the final ones he has of his 24-year-old, mentally ill son attacking
him and then walking away to kill himself, images that intrude on his days and nights along with the questions
that he will begin asking himself soon, but not yet. A few minutes more. Gus fishing. Gus looking at him. Gus
smiling at him. Time to start the day.
• “A Father’s Scars” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2014

11. A provocative question:
“What is the solution to affordable housing in New
York?”
—Trading Parking Lots for Affordable Housing, NY
Times, Oct. 21, 2014

12. A QUOTE
• When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend
[photographer] Joel Bernstein found an old book in a
flea market that said: Ask anyone in America where the
craziest people live and they'll tell you California. Ask
anyone in California where the craziest people live and
they'll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles
where the craziest people live and they'll tell you
Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the
craziest people live and they'll say Laurel Canyon. And
ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest
people live and they'll say Lookout Mountain. So I
bought a house on Lookout Mountain. —Joni Mitchell.
• —Vanity Fair, February, 2015

13. Personal anecdote
• In the 1990s, some seven years before Sofia Coppola
released “Lost in Translation” — and we got to watch
Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray transact
disassociation in Tokyo — I visited Japan for nearly a
month. The first experience sticks with me: being
locked into the bus from the airport, by the driver,
listening as a fellow passenger sneezed over and over
again.
• —IMPACTS! Cute, Grotesque and Almost Perfect,
Adobe Airstrwam, October, 2014

14. And the list goes on
• A good exercise is to try a variety of different ledes: write many different starts
• Never feel locked into your first beginning
• Your beginning should have resonance throughout the piece
• Either circularly (come back to the start)
• Chronologically if you start in the beginning
• Thematically
• All elements mentioned in the lede, if it’s a summary, will make an appearance in
the story
• Read for “starts”—pay attention to how pieces begin.

15. Finding the lede
• Look for what grabbed you into the story
• What do people need to know?
• Where do you want to end up?
• Don’t start where the reporting started, necessarily
• There are many different kinds of chronology

16. Let’s Do that Now
• Try three different starts to your story:
• 1. An informational summary
• 2. Set the scene
• 3. Personal or interview-based anecdote
• Then we’ll read all three and get some feedback