Outlining the Book Introduction
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I’ve worked with a few authors recently who are finishing up the first full draft of their book manuscripts, which for many people means (finally) writing the introduction.
Introductions (and conclusions—more on them next week) are daunting for lots of reasons. If you don’t know quite where to start, here are five ideas to keep in mind as you make your outline.
Get the reader invested quickly. Some people call this the “hook,” but whatever terminology you use, you want the first paragraph to grab the reader’s attention and compel them to want to read more. Often this paragraph frames the research as something that is surprising, compelling, or impactful. Sometimes historians like to use a vignette or case study to connect with the reader, but a clear statement of the argument can also engage the reader’s curiosity.
Explain the book’s argument in broad terms and why the research matters. If you’ve already written the book proposal, then you’ve articulated these ideas before. Go back and mine the proposal—it’s a resource for you as a writer as well as an overture to a publisher.
Position your research in the field. In many subfields of history, we don’t really talk in terms of literature reviews any more, but many people briefly explain the relationship between their research and existing scholarship and/or acknowledge their intellectual debts.
Provide the historical and/or theoretical and/or methodological context that the reader will need to hit the ground running in chapter 1. Some authors struggle to distinguish when these elements should go in the chapter introduction and when they should appear in the book's introduction. If the context applies only to a specific chapter, then I would leave it for the chapter introduction. If the context applies to many chapters, then it is probably something that should be addressed in the book’s introduction.
Give an overview of the book’s structure. In other words, what can the reader expect you to cover in each chapter?
If you wrote the introduction early in your writing process (likely because the publisher requested it as a sample chapter), then be sure to save time to revise it once you’ve finished the rest of the manuscript. Even (especially!) the chapter summaries may have changed between when you outlined the book and when you wrote it. Similarly, you may be able to more clearly express the book’s argument and its relationship to other scholarship once you’ve completed it.
Keep writing (and revising!)—
Katherine
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