THE TOPIC SENTENCE AS SCAFFOLDING
And how to dismantle it in the editorial process
Hello fellow craft nerds, today’s topic is the topic sentence. If you don’t cringe when you hear that phrase, then you’ve never sat at Tom Spanbauer’s (or his students’) table. Perhaps you remember the term from English Comp 101 as a useful starting point when writing an essay. An organizing tool whereby the writer states the topic and its accompanying controlling idea before excavating the particulars.
As an organizing principle, the topic sentence is useful. It’s like the kindergarten teacher’s clap, right? Clap-clap-clapclapclap. It focuses the brain around a concept. It screams: Attention, shoppers! We are now going to discuss this-and-such! It’s the basis for logic-driven rhetoric, and as such, it’s not a bad way into a first draft.
That said, your job as a writer of fiction is to tuck that topic into a scene so seamlessly that your reader manufactures the argument, bringing their own emotional and intellectual infrastructure to bear.
Here’s an example of an opening that starts with a topic sentence:
Our father was against education. He refused to contribute to our college tuition, and discouraged any discussion of post-high school academics, offering instead to fund a sensible mode of transportation with which we could commute to a minimum-wage job at Carl’s Jr.
Got the idea? The argument? The concept? Serviceable, right? We understand something about the family dynamics here. It’s a solid start to building a scene. But now, let’s move it from rhetoric to story: