Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

by Lisa Cron

For example, let’s turn to a master, the unparalleled Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and crib something from Love in the Time of Cholera. The following paragraph is a quintessential example of how the mere description of a room can be harnessed to provide insight into a character. In this passage, Dr. Juvenal Urbino surveys the parlor of his good friend and chess partner, photographer Jeremiah de Saint-Armour, who has just committed suicide. In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino has seen the gradual covering over of these walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by these unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.17 The snippet not only provides backstory and insight into how Dr. Urbino views the world, it also deftly sums up an aspect of the universal human condition that all of us struggle with—that someday the world will go on without us, perhaps as if we had never been. Which, ahem, is one of the reasons we write stories. It’s better than spray painting “Kilroy was here” on a rock.