THE TOPIC SENTENCE
How to unlearn it.
Back in the 90’s, around the Spanbauer table, there was a particular writerly habit that flew in the face of Dangerous Writing’s main tenets. If you committed the faux pas by exercising that habit, you might as well have blown an enormous fart across the candle wax-encrusted table. This element colored the entire reading of your pages. Never mind you employed original burnt tongue; doesn’t matter if the balance of pages revealed brilliant particularity via a first-person narrator. You start with this trespass, and the red fingernails swipe and claw; your pages might as well be rolling papers used for the after-class blaze.
Although my debut, THE MOMENT BEFORE, wouldn’t come out until a more than a decade after those years spent around Tom’s table, his voice of caution flooded my head when I wrote that novel. Go directly to scene. Forget the scaffolding. Fuck topic sentences—banish them.
Not that easy. I mean, I’m talking about a technique widely taught to students from the time they can hold a pencil. Brown-nosers like me were constantly praised for employing those carefully-wrought lead-ins known as topic sentences.
Topic sentences harness the essence of a stance, and make a general statement that is followed by ensuing supportive information. As in: Betty Lu hated school. (Which is then explained via examples.)
Clearly, topic sentences are useful in essay writing, and cozy up to their expositional cousin, The Abstract: dollops of information curated to present the reader with a concept that is then disassembled and laid out to prove a thesis.
A topic sentence is a snapshot. A tool to organize an idea, and present the idea to the audience in a tidy one-liner before unpacking it. It’s a great way to introduce a polemic, right? So left-brained. A bridge from idea to argument.
But, at that table some 25-30 years ago, topic sentences were verboten. Tom’s workshops were largely about unlearning. Replacing intellectual approaches with ones that flood the nervous system with their unflinching pursuit of the ineffable. Or, in Tom’s words, writing fiction to “tell the truth truer.”
If Dangerous Writing is all about stripping away artifice in favor of truth-telling, what tools do we have to tell a cohesive story? Isn’t the opposite of exposition stream-of-consciousness? By abandoning convention, do we run the risk of writing disjointed scenes that come out as cathartic and solipsistic indulgences? Much like conveying last night’s dream to a partner who has yet to have their morning coffee? Ahem.
Friends, I’m here to tell you, there are tools. (Some of these tools will find their way into my upcoming LitReactor Class on Point of View, by the way.)
First, let’s talk about hooks. No matter the genre or the category, all creative writing, whether novel, creative nonfiction, or memoir, has limited real estate in which to hook the reader. To be blunt, you have a paragraph. You know this is true, because of your own book-buying habits, right? You pull a hardcover off a random endcap at Powell’s, you read a couple sentences and, either cram the book back to its face-out status (muttering, as one does, about the unfairness of the market), or, book firmly in your grips, proceed to the checkout line.
What are the deciding factors between a pass and a pick-up? What are the magic elements at work?