I confess: I buried the lead!
What is "burying the lead?" (By the way, "lead" is pronounced like in "leader," not like in "led.")
Writer Nora Ephron told a story about her high school journalism class that explains it. Here's my version of what she said*:
Nora's journalism teacher told the class that "the lead" is the first sentence of a newspaper article, which should summarize concisely what the article is about. That lets readers decide whether they want to keep reading—or else skip to another article.
Next, he read aloud a few sentences along these lines:
Next Thursday, May 28, the faculty of this high school will attend a special training in Sacramento, featuring the anthropologist Margaret Mead and others. The faculty will learn new teaching methods, the principal announced today.
Then the teacher instructed the class members to write down their idea of "the lead" for an article about that "special training" announcement.
The students typed their answers, which mostly consisted of re-ordering the existing opening paragraph so it would begin with the famous name of Margaret Mead—who was certainly a key attraction to the training. Then they passed their papers forward for the teacher to examine.
The teacher read them all—and then tore them all up!
"All of you buried the lead," he growled. "You didn't lead with the most interesting information for your readers at this school!"
They looked at him, stunned.
He continued, "The lead to this story is this: 'No school next Thursday!'"
When I first read Ephron's telling of that story,* I chuckled and thought "I wouldn't bury that lead. Surely I would know the key thing to emphasize!"
Oops! Sometimes I'm Just Wrong!
Last spring, I came up with the idea for a course on "How to Grow a Book—Without Doing it Alone."
In the process of brainstorming the course's content, I imagined a novel kind of help (in which the writer of a passage hears it read aloud and then asks the readers, "What did you learn from what you just read? What did you feel? What questions did it bring up for you?")
Learning to get and give that kind of feedback will be only one part of the course, but it is something new—and it excites me with its possibilities.
So I sent out a series of emails explaining the "new and different" part of the course.
Man, Did I Bury It!
A few days ago, I realized that nearly all of my recent descriptions of my upcoming "How to Grow a Book" course did, in fact, bury the lead!
What happened? Sure enough, I was so concerned with explaining one unusual aspect of the course, that I forgot to describe the lead of the course, which I now understand as:
"Learn six key ways you can get help as a writer—and how to recruit and train the kinds of helpers you need for each!"
Can you hear the sound of my palm slapping against my forehead?
What Storytellers Can Learn from This
Journalists focus on "the lead" because they need to present their main point boldly and immediately. After all, their key job is to give information—and their readers or listeners need to know what they'll be informed about—before they'll agree to read or listen.
Storytellers, though, have a bit more leeway. Yes, we need to grab the interest of our listeners right away, but we can grab it in many ways. For example, we can jump right into the narrative, which can be fully engrossing without regard for the subject matter. Or we can begin with a provocative question that slides straight into the narrative:
"Have you ever done something really dangerous that you knew better than to do? Well, last summer I was driving through Chicago during rush hour when I…"
Nevertheless, everything a storyteller does actually happens within a bigger context, which includes who is listening to us, and why—and what we propose to offer them.
The Most Important Thing?
Each storytelling event, then, (whether a performance or a workshop or course)—has its own "Most Important Thing' ("MIT"). Knowing our MIT for an individual story is vital, but not enough.
In other words, we need to discover—and commit to—the MITs of:
our story, or
our storytelling event, or
our storytelling workshop or course,
If we don't make that commitment, we won't be able to make effective decisions about what to include, how to include it, or —especially—how to publicize it.
But once we've unearthed the MIT for whatever we're doing, we can be better prepared for:
choosing what to do,
knowing how to do it, and, as a result,
learning how to describe our work to others.
The minute we lose sight of any part of an event's MIT, then, we're likely to do something unproductive—like "burying the lead."
The Good News
Fortunately, by thinking, talking, and writing about an event (or a course!) we can, in time, come to a clear understanding of why the event is important and what those attending will gain from it. Only then will we be able to describe it clearly and convincingly!
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* Adapted from Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.