One of the most paralysing questions for academic writers is often the simplest: where do I start? For early career researchers staring at months of data, dozens of theoretical sources, and a looming submission deadline, the blank page can feel like an impossible threshold to cross. John McPhee, Pulitzer Prize winning author and sometimes a professor of writing at Princeton, offers advice that speaks directly to this paralysis:
Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it. Write a lead. If the whole piece is not to be a long one, you may plunge right on and out the other side and have a finished draft before you know it; but if the piece is to have some combination of substance, complexity, and structural juxtaposition that pays dividends, you might begin with that acceptable and workable lead and then be able to sit back with the lead in hand and think about where you are going and how you plan to get there. Writing a successful lead, in other words, can illuminate the structure problem for you and cause you to see the piece whole – to see it conceptually, in various parts, to which you then assign your materials. You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write.
The lead – like the title – should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead. A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows.
(McPhee, 2017, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, Text Publishing, Melbourne)
There’s wisdom here for academic writers. McPhee’s insight that a good beginning can “illuminate the structure problem” resonates deeply with the experience of scholarly writing. When you craft an opening that captures what your piece is about, you often find that the architecture of the whole argument becomes clearer. The lead becomes a compass point, a way of orienting yourself in what might otherwise feel like an overwhelming mass of material. Your introduction isn’t just telling readers where you’re going; it’s helping you understand your own destination.
McPhee’s metaphor of the flashlight is particularly apt for academic writing. Your opening should cast light forward into the piece, allowing readers to glimpse what kind of journey they’re embarking on. Is this going to be a theoretical intervention? An empirical investigation? A methodological reflection? The lead makes a promise about the nature of the scholarly conversation you’re entering, and keeping that promise is what creates coherence and satisfying structure.
But there’s an important caveat: while McPhee’s approach may work for many writers, it’s not the only way into a piece of writing, and it’s certainly not the only way to solve structural problems. Some academic writers find that they need to write their way into understanding what they want to say. They begin in the middle, or with a section they feel confident about, using the act of writing itself as a tool for thinking through their argument. For these writers, the introduction often comes last, crafted only after they’ve discovered through drafting what the piece is really about.
Others work from detailed outlines, building scaffolding before they write a single sentence. Still others circle around their material, writing fragments and notes and half-formed paragraphs until patterns emerge and a structure crystallises. The doctoral researcher who writes their analysis chapter first, then returns to frame it theoretically, is doing perfectly legitimate intellectual work, even if it doesn’t follow McPhee’s sequence.
What McPhee offers, then, is not a prescription but an invitation. If you’re stuck, if you can’t see the shape of what you’re trying to say, try writing a lead. Not The Lead, not necessarily the final polished introduction that will appear in your published work, but a lead – an attempt to articulate what your piece is about. It’s a place-holder. Even if you discard it later, even if your actual introduction ends up looking completely different, the act of writing that opening gambit might help you see your structure as a whole. It might help you understand what promise you’re making to your readers, and whether your materials can deliver on that promise.
The key is understanding that all these approaches – beginning with the lead, discovering the lead through writing, constructing the lead last – are solving the same fundamental problem: how to create coherence between what you promise and what you deliver, how to ensure your opening is, as McPhee puts it, “absolute to what follows.” Whether you write your way to that absoluteness or plan your way there is less important than achieving it.
So if you’re struggling with where to begin, try McPhee’s method. Hunt through your mind for a good beginning and write it. See if it illuminates the structure problem. But if it doesn’t, if you’re someone who needs to write first and understand later, that’s OK too. The goal isn’t to find the one true writing process; it’s to find the process that helps you produce rigorous, coherent, compelling academic work. Sometimes that starts with a flashlight. Sometimes you need to build a fire first and read by its light.
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