The First Step and the Last: Beginnings and Endings

Two sets of words carry disproportionate weight in any piece, and this step — how to write beginnings and endings — attends to both: the gate your reader enters by, and the ground you leave them standing on

• Step 6 of 7 · The Autumn 2026 Footpath· £50
• Saturday 19 Sep · 4–6 PM London · 11 AM New York · 8 AM San Francisco · 5 PM Paris · 8:30 PM Delhi · 1 AM Sydney (next day)
• Live online, a recording goes to everyone

A reader decides in a paragraph and remembers in a sentence. Everything between those two moments matters enormously — and neither of them will forgive you for getting it wrong. This class teaches you how to write beginnings and endings as a single problem rather than two, because that is what they are.

Entrances should entrance. Your opening five hundred words are a contract. They tell your reader what this piece concerns, what kind of attention it will ask of them, how long the sentences will run, and who is speaking. Readers absorb all of this in seconds and mostly below the level of conscious thought — and a reader who senses that promise broken at paragraph nine rarely complains. They simply leave, and you never learn why.

So we begin with what an opening must establish, and how quickly. A first line has four jobs available to it, and you will learn to choose deliberately between them. First, it can pose a question the reader now needs answered. Second, it can plant an image they cannot put down. Third, it can establish a voice so distinct that they will follow it anywhere. Fourth, it can place them somewhere specific — a room, a hillside, a particular February. The strongest openings usually do two of the four at once, while appearing to do nothing at all, and we will take several apart to see how.

Most advice about hooks encourages a kind of shouting: start in the middle of the explosion, open with the shocking sentence, grab them by the lapels. It works about as often as shouting does. The openings that actually hold a reader make them curious about something specific, then decline to satisfy that curiosity immediately.

You will learn to tell an earned hook from a borrowed one, to spot the false start that most drafts carry in their first two paragraphs, and to recognise the single commonest fault in nonfiction openings: throat-clearing. Almost every first draft begins one, two, or three paragraphs before the piece actually starts. Finding your real opening usually means deleting rather than writing.

We take real openings apart in the room — several of them, drawn from memoir, nature writing, the personal essay and reportage — and questions. We will ask of each one what it promises, how it makes that promise, and what it deliberately withholds. This is where writers learn how to start a memoir or an essay far more reliably than from any rule. We watch how someone good did it, slowly enough to see the mechanism, and we try our hands at it.

There is no pre-reading for this class, and that is deliberate. You cannot study a first impression you have already had. Arriving fresh to these openings is the method.

Then in this process of learning how to write beginnings and endings, we turn the piece around. Endings belong in the same class as openings because a great ending returns, transformed, to the promise the opening made — and you cannot judge one without the other in front of you.

You will learn to distinguish resolution, which closes a question, from resonance, which lets the question go on sounding after the page ends. Nonfiction usually wants the second. We will look at the final image against the final idea, at why the last paragraph is almost always written last — once you finally know what the piece was about. We will also discuss the strange fact that your real ending often sits three sentences above the one you wrote.

And we will name the commonest fault in nonfiction endings: the summary. You have felt it as a reader — a piece holds you for pages, arrives somewhere, then spends four final sentences telling you what you have just read. The writer has not added anything; they have taken something away. Restating what you have already shown tells your reader you did not trust them to understand it. Learning how to write beginnings and endings well is largely a matter of trusting your reader at both ends of the piece.

Anyone with a piece that will not start. Anyone with a draft that stops rather than ends. Writers who have been told their work takes too long to get going, and writers who suspect their conclusions restate rather than resolve. If you have wondered how to write beginnings and endings that do more than get on and off the page, this is the class for it. It suits memoirists and essayists particularly, though the principles hold across the whole of nonfiction.

Read before: nothing — deliberately. Arriving fresh to the openings we study is part of the method.

Bring: the first paragraph of something you are writing, and its current last line.

About The Footpath

Kathryn discovered the joys of footpaths when she moved to England in 2007, and they have served as significant parts of living a narrative life.

The Footpath series of masterclasses takes its name from the way a path is actually made. Nobody surveys it or lays it down; it appears because one person walks a route, and then another, until the ground itself remembers the way through. Learning to write works the same way. These seven masterclasses are seven steps along that path — each one complete in itself, each one two hours of live teaching you can take on its own, and each one facing the same direction. Walk a single step if that is what you need. Walk three. Walk all seven and you will have crossed the whole ground, from the empty desk on Monday morning to the revised page on Sunday night.

About Kathryn

Kathryn Aalto is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and passionate teacher of narrative nonfiction. Her books include The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood and Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World.

From her studio in Devon, England, she leads The Narrative Life, an international school of narrative nonfiction whose students write from six continents. She teaches live online creative nonfiction courses in memoir, nature writing, travel writing and literary nonfiction — many of her students arriving as complete beginners, with nothing but a true story they needed to tell. Her students have gone on to win national travel writing prizes and sign contracts with major publishers.

Her teaching is built on her Eight Pillars of Narrative Nonfiction — presence, arc, character, dialogue, voice, language, setting and resonance — a framework for turning real life into resonant story. She holds master’s degrees in garden history and creative nonfiction, has taught critical thinking at university level, and believes the writing life is not a talent bestowed on a few but a path anyone can walk with excellent teaching. How to Build a Writing Practice is a practical component amongst her artistic technique-driven classes.

This is one of the classes Kathryn most enjoys teaching, because beginnings and endings are where craft becomes visible. An opening teaches you to stop announcing what your piece is about and let it show; an ending teaches you to stop explaining and trust your reader instead. Learn how to write beginnings and endings well and the writing goes somewhere you could not have planned.

Explore all of Kathryn’s online creative nonfiction writing courses, masterclasses and mentoring: Online Creative Nonfiction Writing Courses | Kathryn Aalto.

“The Research for Writers masterclass was simply superb. It was the boost I needed to help to conceptualize, and most importantly, get started on the research I need to do for a book project. The accompanying guide is robust and detailed with practical information around online and offline sources to explore. What’s more is that the instructor taught from personal experience with vivid stories of how she approached research for her best-selling work. I highly recommend this masterclass!” — Chris A., New York, New York

Autumn 2026 Footpath Masterclasses