The first line of a blog post is not as important as you think. Sure, you want to draw people in – with a sexy image, a powerful statement, or perhaps a controversial statement to pique their interest like I’ve done here. But the first line is no more than a ‘hello’. You’re setting out your stall and encouraging people to approach, but you don’t need the first line to do more than just grab someone’s attention. The final line of a blog post: that’s what counts.
This piece was prompted by a recent chat in which someone pointed out to me that Jenby’s guest blogs always have a killer final line. I’m glad they noticed, because I do too. Jenby’s an exceptional writer, you can tell from the way she manages to carefully weave horn and emotion together to make the reader feel like they’re there in the room, and the way she’ll pepper her blog posts with jokes to break the tension in the middle of a kink scene. Most of all, though, the dead giveaway of an awesome writer is someone who can end on a heartpunch (or a gutpunch, or a cuntpunch) final line. I never have to edit her final lines, because Jenby always always ends with a bang.
I don’t tend to post much writing advice here, mainly because I’m not an expert writer. I have never taken a writing class outside A-levels or whatever, and even though I’ve made a living off this shit for over a decade, I still don’t understand all the technical details of how to do it. To be honest; I don’t even really know the correct use of a semi-colon. Personally I believe that when you’re writing, you should ignore the rules imposed on you by dead people, and instead follow the directions of your heart. Does this word or piece of punctuation sound right to you? Does it make the reader feel how you want them to feel? Sure, what you’re saying needs to be vaguely comprehensible to whoever is reading your language, but more importantly does it resonate? Will it pluck a string in the reader’s heart that will still be thrumming long after they’ve left the page?
Perhaps this advice shows up how bad I am as a writer. I am good at feelings, so those are what I deal in mostly. Even when I’m trying to make an argument that relies on things like logic, fundamentally I’m doing it by playing on your emotions. I don’t just want you to understand me and agree, I want to make you feel the way that I do. So the technical specifics of writing, like not starting sentences with ‘so’ – or understanding the difference between an m-dash and an n-dash — are entirely outside of both my knowledge and my capacity to give a flying fuck. I am not interested in writing as a skill in and of itself, but a tool with which you tell stories. I want to hear your story, and if you’re pitching me a guest blog then I’m looking for something that’s personal to you. A window into your life, which you can allow me to peek – and sometimes jump – through so I can stand for a moment in your shoes, look around and go ‘wow, this person has a unique take on the world that I’d never understood before’. Or, in Jenby’s case, ‘wow, this girl’s kinky as fuck!’.
Because of this, I do my best not to edit guest bloggers’ work very much, and when I do make changes I try to ensure your tone/style/voice isn’t lost in a flurry of my own opinions.
The one exception? The final line.
The final line
The final line of a blog post is far and away the most important. While the first is responsible for grabbing a reader’s attention, the final line works so much harder – it has to summarise what you’ve said, conclude a neat point, hit a satisfying emotion or leave the reader with an intriguing idea. Above all it must resonate in a way that really lasts.
If you’re writing something humorous, your final sentence is a punchline: make sure it’s funny.
If you’re making an argument, your final line is essentially the act of handing your reader a placard and encouraging them to spread the word, so make it bright and bold and memorable.
If your piece is romantic or beautiful, the final line is the gentle kiss goodbye… so make me want more.
If you’re writing erotica, then ooh boy. Your final line is either the orgasmic climax with which you leave your reader panting and spent, or the satisfying aftercare you give when the fucking is done. Don’t know which one it should be? Revise your draft! Immediately!
You wouldn’t walk out of a lover’s bedroom with a dribbled ‘see ya’ and halfhearted wave: show your reader the same courtesy, ya fuckboi. It doesn’t matter exactly when you end your sex story, during climax or aftercare or even halfway through. What matters is that readers should reach that last full-stop feeling utterly, thoroughly fucked.
As I say, Jenby is the absolute Queen of the final line. And many other guest bloggers nail it spectacularly too. I’m going to show a few examples of awesome final lines, and in the process explain what I think makes them so special. Obviously guest blogs on this site are usually about sex, but I hope this advice works for other writing too: your first line is important, but the final line matters so much more. Whether you’re sending someone a love letter or writing a strongly-worded email, or anything else where you want people to take away a feeling and carry it forward. There are two things that matter when it comes to your final line.
What you say + the way you say it
What you say
I am sure I’m in the minority here, but it genuinely makes me sad when I read an incredible piece of writing with a weirdly throwaway final line. Someone’s taken me on an emotional journey, or persuaded me to consider their opinion with a well-constructed argument, then the last line says something like…
“Maybe that’s just me though – what are your thoughts?”
…or some other milquetoast bullshit.
No! You had me, goddammit!
You had me, and now you’ve let me go like I’m a cheap, one-night-only Tinder fuck. If you’ve put this much work into getting me pulsing with your ideas or drive or horn, don’t drop me like a hot brick just because I’ve hit the bottom of the scroll bar: keep me! Hold me!
Give me my happy finish, for crying out loud!
The way you say it
Once you’ve decided what you want to say, take the time to craft it in a way that sounds beautiful. By this I mean that your final line should have rhythm. It has to lead neatly on from the sentence before, and land with a thump in the heart of your reader.
This point is best illustrated by example so here are a few kickass final lines in guest blogs. Take note of the way that the sentence prior to the last one builds you up, as if it’s just lifting you ever so slightly from the ground before it drops you into that last sentence. Or it makes your heart swell with hope before resolving that hope in a way that’s audibly satisfying.
If you don’t understand what I mean, read them aloud.
By Emilia Romero, at the end of a beautifully moving post about friendship and overcoming trauma and building closeness:
This isn’t a piece about the bad things that happened. This isn’t a piece about the people who did those bad things.
This is a piece about trust. It’s a piece about hope and magic. It’s a piece about lust and strength and pain and fear and safety.
This is a piece about love.
See what she did there? The sentences which told you what this wasn’t followed by beautiful staccato assertions about what it was? Nudging your gaze downwards before building you up with a few positive little facts before finally punching into your heart right at the end the larger truth she wants you to take away: This is a piece about love.
Similarly moving, and extremely beautiful, is the final line in this piece by Blake, a nonbinary guest blogger, about their feelings around gender and sex while breastfeeding. They discuss a breathtaking cunt-punching play session which helps them feel like they’re fully inhabiting their body and gender during a time of their lives when that is difficult to achieve:
But the rest of the day, that glow of affirmation stays with me: grounding me. The residual ache in my cunt brings a smile to my face.
I’m breastfeeding my baby, and I’m my lover’s good boy.
I adore the way they re-centre the reader in their feelings, giving us a residual pulse of understanding to carry away – one that echoes the affirmation Blake was experiencing at the time. As far as final lines go, it’s got such power.
But you don’t need to be serious to deliver a killer final line. Here’s one by Jenby, in a post about sweating wearing latex:
So please, if it’s warm out and you find yourself perspiring in the presence of a petite blonde girl with a cute fringe and hairy pits, take my advice:
Don’t sweat it.
She is always incredible at ending a post on a joke, like a lover giggling to you in bed after you’ve done the most depraved things together. Teasing you a little with the smoking-hot image of her getting hot and bothered, then surprising you with a punchline that diffuses the sexual tension (a little). It’s the difference between writing a post that explains her kink, and writing one that makes you feel like you’re in the room with her. At a sleepover, perhaps, where you’re playing a game of ‘I Have Never’ – jaw on the floor at her antics.
Note: do not – I repeat do NOT – get into a game of ‘I Have Never’ with Jenby. You will be humiliated. Your puny adventures can never compete. Fuck ‘bringing a knife to a gun fight’, it’s like bringing a plastic teaspoon to World War Six (complimentary).
In a similar vein to the above, here’s the fabulous Tess in a post about the best sex of her (and her wife’s) life:
I help them to the bed and we clean up. We’re trying to find our breath again, and our bodies are yelling at us. But we both know that was the best sex of our lives. We did what felt right in the moment, but it was the instincts we built up, and the preparation we did before that made it possible, made it perfect.
Well… almost perfect… I forgot to put a pot of tea on.
Can I get a chef’s kiss pls? CHEF’S FUCKING KISS. Calming us down, post-fuck. Looking after us. Mopping our brows and wiping up all the sex juice before returning with a cheeky grin to the cosy chat from whence we came. Delightful.
And another, which I’m including because I think stylistically the examples above are all similar to the style I use myself. But you don’t need to have that lift-then-drop energy to deliver a fantastic final line. Robyn’s writing has an ethereal softness to it, and their final paragraphs and lines are incredible because they bring that same gentleness to the end of a piece. They still have beautiful rhythm, but this time the rhythm is less ‘one-two punch’ than it is ‘waves lapping at a beach, gently lulling you off to sleep.’ See what I mean in this piece – Bareback in the dark…
Sleep reclaimed us both while our bodies were still joined together. I didn’t even get to feel his cum trickle out behind his softening cock and drip down between my arse cheeks and onto the bed. The bird continued to sing outside, alone once more in the receding darkness.
Gorgeous, innit? The imagery is beautiful, and calls back to the start of the post itself, and the lilt of it feels almost melodic and hypnotic – like a lullaby.
While all these lines serve different purposes, and the tone of the pieces varies from earnest to funny to softly sexy, every single one of them has something important in common: a seriously resonant final line.
Good final lines vs bad final lines
If you’re still not sure what makes a bad vs good final line, hopefully the following example will show better than I can explain. Here’s an extract from a ranty post that I wrote about men who seek to give me critical ‘feedback’ on my body. I’m basically trying to instruct any future lover to treat my self-esteem with precious care, and avoid saying critical things about my body that I’ll carry with me forever. Here’s the end:
If you believe that being intimate with someone means you have a right to tell them how to change their body to please you, that’s your prerogative. Go find someone else who believes that and critique each other to your hearts’ content. But leave me alone.
Leave me in peace.
Leave me to feel how I feel about my body without any input from you, because that input can often be crushing and deeply harmful, and I will carry the scars of it with me for the rest of my life.
JUST KIDDING. Obviously that’s not how I ended it: that would be shit! The final sentence repeats my main point, but in a wishy-washy unmemorable way that dribbles to the end of the page rather than punching it with a final ‘full-stop… end of discussion.’
Here’s how I actually ended it:
If you believe that being intimate with someone means you have a right to tell them how to change their body to please you, that’s your prerogative. Go find someone else who believes that and critique each other to your hearts’ content. But leave me alone.
Leave me in peace.
Leave me, I beg you, in tact.
Not to blow my own trumpet but that’s better. It’s just… so much better.
But the first line is still important!
I mean… sure. Of course. If your first line is too long and meandering it’ll lose people’s attention, and if it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with your piece it’ll deceive the reader and have them clicking away after they get to the meat of your story. I’d argue, though, that a first paragraph is more important than a single first line. Having a little more space allows you to set a tone, and give people a broad idea of what to expect from your piece.
I asked Mastodon recently which line of a blog post they thought was the most important, and it shocked me to learn that 55% of them were wrong. More than half of the respondents picked ‘the first line’, and I suspect some of that is influenced by the heavy weight we’ve placed on opening lines in literature.
I know that on a bright cold day in April, when the clocks are striking 13, killer opening lines like the one in 1984 get a lot of credit but… in everyday writing, on the blogs and websites you’re scrolling when you’ve clicked through from social media, do you really remember the first line as powerfully as the line that bids you goodbye?
I could show you a few guest pieces with incredible opening lines, too, and I admire all these writers for being far better at laying out the ‘welcome’ mat than I am. But I maintain that the first line will never do as much for readers as the last. I don’t think the blog posts without an amazing opener are as noticeable to readers as the posts which zing with power but don’t take care to finish on a flourish.
The first line needs to be good, for sure, but the final line works harder.
The final line does so much more.
The final line is the money shot.
2 Comments
It’s been said that we remember the first line of novels and the last line of movies. Perhaps that’s true to an extent. Novels tend to be something we plow through unsteadily, stopping often to chew on, and sometimes never finishing. But, short stories, essays, and blog posts are not novels. They are meant to be consumed in one sitting, like a movie or a pint of ice cream. They can and should be complete, with beginning, middle, and end.
A skillful writer will make sure that when the words reach completion, so do we, the readers. Like the “tonic” in a symphony, there’s a note we’ve been aching to hear, often without realizing it. A well-written story culminates bit-by-bit, pushing us uneasily up to the very edge. At the final line, the author can deftly touch us with just the softest stroke of a pen; the tension crystallizes, bright and clear, and reaches its shattering release. Satisfaction.
VERY nicely done, bravo ❤️