“The rumble of the horses woke the dog first, and the dog woke Charles Martin.”

I started Condemned for Love in Old Virginia with that sentence and decided last week to start my talk that way too. I was to speak at the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier and wanted to try something different.

Usually, I tell an audience that my plan for the next 45 minutes is to start wide, narrow once, then narrow a second time.

Translated, that means that I talk about lynching in the U.S., especially in the states of the Old Confederacy. Then I narrow the focus to talk about lynching in Virginia, then narrow again to talk about one lynching, the death of Arthur Jordan.

My hope is that the details of one incident—the alleged crime, the capture and execution—will give insight into the thousands of other lynchings that took place.

In Fauquier last week, I decided to follow my own example from the book. I changed the order of my talk to reflect the advice often given to writers: Don’t begin at the beginning.

Stories are best told, according to this thinking, by finding an incident somewhere in the middle to bring forward to the start. The idea is to create mystery that hooks the reader. Characters are unexplained at that point, setting is unclear and plot is unknown. Readers are introduced to the story through a bit of action. The writer eventually supplies the needed details but first creates an intriguing tension. They tease, then please.

I did this in the book by starting with the arrival of the horsemen in Warrenton and their abduction of Jordan.

For the talk, I figured the Fauquier audience would recognize landmarks like Waterloo Street and the Warrenton jail, so I started the same way. Then I widened the focus to talk generally about lynching and finally finished with a detailed look at Jordan and what led to his murder.

The next day, I asked Karen Hughes White, my host and director of the association, if she thought the new format worked. She replied, “Positive feedback from everyone I spoke with yesterday and today.” I took that as a signal to continue.