on-writing-well

270 ON WRITING WELL
serving quotes and use them with gratitude. Here's the last paragraph
of the lead:
Well, that's my kind of trip, if not necessarily my kind of
prose, and it also turned out to be my wife's kind of trip and
four other people's kind of trip. In years we ranged from late
middle age to Medicare. Five of us were from mid-Manhattan,
one was a widow from Maryland, and all of us had made
a lifelong habit of traveling to places on the edge. Names like
Venice and Versailles didn't bob up in our accounts of earlier
trips, or even Marrakech or Luxor or Chiang Mai. The talk
was of Bhutan and Borneo, Tibet and Yemen and the Moluccas.
Now—praise Allah!—we had made it to Timbuktu. Our
camel caravan was about to come in.
That concludes the lead. Those six paragraphs took as long to
write as the entire remainder of the piece. But when I finally
wrestled them into place I felt confidently launched. Maybe
someone else could write a better lead for that story, but /
couldn't. I felt that readers who were still with me would stay to
the end.
No less important than decisions about structure are decisions
about individual words. Banality is the enemy of good writing;
the challenge is to not write like everybody else. One fact
that had to be stated in the lead was how old the six of us were.
Initially I wrote something serviceable like "we were in our
fifties and sixties." But the merely serviceable is a drag. Was
there any way to state the fact with freshness? There didn't
seem to be. At last a merciful muse gave me Medicare—and
thus the phrase "from late middle age to Medicare." If you look
long enough you can usually find a proper name or a metaphor
that will bring those dull but necessary facts to life.
Even more time went into the sentence about Venice and