How to Begin
April 22, 2026 at 05:30PMIn 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?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/22/writing-fiction-opening-line/
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