Then How Should I Begin

Start Your Story With a Bang

Welcome to Shelf Life, where any opportunity to quote “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” will be leapt upon. If you are going to study English in college, you pretty much have to like TS Eliot. This is because you will study him in both American and British literature (he was born an American but renounced his citizenship and became a British citizen about halfway through his life). This is your interesting literature fact of the day. If that’s all you came for, you can close this window and move on with your life.

Should you choose to continue, today I’m talking about how to pinpoint the best place to begin your story, whether it is a novel, short story, screenplay, or anything else. This is a topic I touched on in June’s Start Me Up, which covers the elements you want to make sure you include in the beginning of your story to hook the reader: Voice, questions, character, and stakes. If you didn’t read that one, or could use a refresher, consider it recommended reading to accompany today’s essay.

Herein, I’ll focus not on what you should include in the first 5 or 10 percent of your story but instead on the mechanics of how to begin a story. In today’s Shelf Life, look forward to learning about:

• At what point in time should you fix a story’s beginning? 

• What does it actually mean to “start at the latest possible point”?

• When is it appropriate not to begin at the beginning? 

• Is it better to start with dialogue, action, or exposition? and

• A handful of overdone, cliché beginnings to avoid.

I’ll also include examples of how the techniques I discuss are used in successful books. 

If you’ve been wondering how or where or when to start the story you want to write, or if you’re considering whether your story’s beginning is as impactful as you need it to be or whether you should rewrite, this Shelf’s for you.

Start at the Latest Possible Point

Start your story as late as you can, at the last possible moment. We’ve all heard this advice a million times, to the point that it’s like “show, don’t tell” and “don’t use adverbs”: A writerly soundbite that never actually comes with instructions on how to do it or information on what it means.

How do you determine the “latest possible moment”? The Hunger Games starts with Katniss waking up on the morning of the Reaping. By this rule, should the story have started at the Reaping, instead of the morning of? Or what about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? That story starts when Harry is just a baby, and the inciting incident doesn’t come until he receives his Hogwarts letter at eleven years old.

Two things to keep in mind with “start at the last possible moment.” First, this advice is meant to remind writers not to start with a “complete history up till now” of the main character or the setting. This doesn’t mean that you must start right at the very moment of the inciting incident, though you can. Rather, it means to begin around the inciting incident or in the immediate lead up to it. You don’t need to start with all the backstory up till the moment of the inciting incident. You don’t need to do a Tristram Shandy. For instance, we don’t need to begin Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with an entire history of the wizard war and all the events of Harry’s life till age eleven. That all gets filled in later. Instead, we get enough information to get us asking questions (more on this in a second) and to introduce us to the story—importantly, that magical people are involved—before we get dumped into the Dursleys’ mundane home on the eve of Harry’s birthday.

Figure out what your inciting incident is: What is the event that changes your protagonist’s life forever, that sets them on their journey? Then, look for an opening around that incident. Begin as close to the incident as you can while still imparting to the reader all the information they need to understand the significance of the inciting incident. 

In The Hunger Games, the morning Katniss spends hunting prior to the Reaping, and her interior monologue while she’s doing it, introduces the reader to important information, without which the inciting incident would lack impact. Importantly, that Katniss knows she has a high chance of being reaped; that she has done everything in her power already to protect her sister, Prim, from being reaped; and that she is the sole provider for her family. Without that information, the events of the Reaping would carry less emotional weight and, worse, Katniss’s motivation for doing what she does would not be clear.

Start With a Question

This need not be a literal question, as in, a sentence ending with a question mark, although it can be, as in Charlotte’s Web by EB White:

“Where's Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

This could also be a statement that invites the reader to ask a question—preferably a burning one, one that will compel them to read on to learn the answer:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell)

Readers will be used to clocks going to twelve, so naturally this invites the question: Where is this narrator that clocks go to thirteen? What else about this setting is different than what I’m used to?

Another example I cited in June was the opening line from The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen:

Pa was taking too long to cut the boys’ throats.

This sentence very economically invites several questions at once: Why is Pa cutting the boys’ throats? What boys? Who are they? What do you mean ‘too long’? How long is ‘too long’? Does this mean there’s a correct amount of time for cutting throats? Does Pa cut throats all the time? And if so, why is it taking longer than usual?

The benefit of opening your story with a question, whether explicit or implicit, is that the reader will naturally want to know the answer. I want to know where Papa is going with that ax. I want to know why the clock is striking thirteen instead of starting over at one after it hits twelve. I want to know why it’s taking Pa so long to cut the boys’ throats (possibly because he has to sharpen his ax first).

If you lead with an intriguing question, the reader will keep moving forward in the story to learn the answer.

Start With Senses

When choosing the moment to start—as we already discussed, this should be close to the inciting incident if you can manage it and should invite the reader to ask questions—look for an action scene that fits the prior criteria. Action—as opposed to or mixed together with exposition and dialogue—is a great way to start a story because it connects with the reader in a visceral, bodily way. Things are happening. There’s physical motion. There are sights, sounds, and scents inherent in the action of the scene that help place the reader inside the story. Consider the opening lines of Persephone Station by Stina Leicht:

The clatter of heavy power-assisted armor echoed off the rocky hills as the corporate mercenaries lined up behind Serrao-Orlov’s latest representative. The scent of machine oil, foul chemicals, and rubberized plastic wafted from the group. A military-grade personnel carrier squatted in the dirt not far away.

Leicht starts the reader off with sound (“clatter . . . echoed”), scent (“machine oil, foul chemicals, and rubberized plastic”), and visuals (“corporate mercenaries lined up,” “military-grade personnel carrier squatted”) that indicate there’s about to be a throwdown. Armed forces are squaring up for a fight. Something is happening here.

This is a far cry from Katniss Everdeen waking up in the morning, noticing her sister isn’t in the bed with her, and then getting dressed to start her day. I enjoy The Hunger Games—and a lot of people did, it was a huge hit—but that is not the strongest opening for a story. In fact, it engages in one of the cardinal sins of story openings (read on to find out what they are).

Start With the Most Interesting Part of Your Story

Okay so what if—hear me out—what if the story starts slow and there’s just no way around that? What if the inciting incident isn’t that exciting on its face, and the significance of it won’t be revealed till later? 

A great question. I read and write mostly genre fiction, which is often written in a more direct way than literary fiction, especially experimental literary fiction. What if the story you’re telling takes awhile to get going? What if you’re intending to write a slow burn?

I like to use Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as an example of taking an interesting part of your story, putting that first, and then backtracking to the inciting incident and telling the story from there. In The Secret History, the inciting event is when Richard Papen (the narrator) meets Henry and falls in with his clique of classics majors. This leads to the murder of one of their clique—Bunny—but the murder itself doesn’t happen till halfway through the book.

Donna Tartt put the murder first, right in the opening lines of the story, and then backed up to describe Richard’s arrival at Hampden College and introduction to Henry et al. In my opinion this is an intelligent choice because if I start reading The Secret History without knowing that these studious Greek and Latin scholars were going to commit a premeditated murder, I would probably have stopped reading after fifty pages, wondering where on earth Donna Tartt was going with all this. Knowing that the story is heading toward the murder of the narrator’s friend and peer, but not knowing why, is what compels the reader to keep going.

Don’t Start With Me: A Fistfull of Don’ts

Before I sign off I want to touch on a handful of the most overused, universally eye-roll-inciting story openings. These usually come from a place of wanting to bring the reader in on a clean start and fill in the details the writer imagines the reader needs to get started—but believe me when I say, none of these is considered a good way to start a story.

Does this mean you can’t start a story this way? No. You can do whatever you want and nobody can say you can’t. Just use any of the below with extreme caution and, if you see anything below that you know you’ve already written, rethink the opening and see if you can find a better angle.

It Was All A Dream

This is the infamous psyche-out opening. Your character is in the middle of a dramatic scene, action is happening, snappy dialogue is flying and then—they wake up. Surprise, it’s boring old normal life after all. There’s nothing wrong with dream sequences in storytelling but this is not what you want to start with unless you’re really clear on what you’re doing and you’re out to subvert this overused trope. Readers tend to dislike the dream-sequence start because, first, it feels like a bait-and-switch and, second, because they have to start the story twice.

Chances are, you can do without this dream. If you really want to include the dream, work it into the story later on and find a different scene to open with.

Good Morning, Good Morning

Hot on the heels of the “Surprise! It was a dream!” opening is the waking-up-and-starting-their-day opening. You know—getting out of bed, taking a shower, getting dressed, going to work. This is tempting for developing writers because it feels like you’re introducing the character at “a fresh starting point” (that is, the beginning of the day), and also because you can do one of these ones:

Karen studied herself in the mirror as she pulled on her houndstooth jacket and fluffed her wavy brown hair. “Not bad,” she thought to herself, admiring her long, lean figure and slim, oval face with large, brown eyes and plump lips.

This may feel like an easy way to let the reader know what your character looks like but please do not do this. Nobody stands in front of the mirror in the morning and says to themself, “I sure do have long, shiny black hair, big baby-blue eyes, and pert c-cup breasts!” Find a more organic way to let us know what your character looks like and a more interesting part of the day to lead with.

Infodump Wars

Exposition overload is the interest-killer. You may feel an irrepressible urge to tell your reader all the background information they might want to know before you dive into any action or dialogue—and this goes double if you write science fiction or fantasy, with their unfamiliar settings. But this is about the worst way you can start a story—with a bunch of setup for your opening scene. 

If you can’t quite bring yourself to start with the action, go ahead and write the exposition your heart is begging you to write. When you’ve written through all that exposition to some actual action, go back and make a list of all the informational tidbits you imparted in the infodump. Those are things you need to work into your story later. For now, highlight everything from the first word to the start of the action and cut-paste it into a separate document. You don’t have to delete it, just remove it. See how the story start feels different when you lead with action. 

Still not sure? Make two versions—one with the infodump start and one with the action start. Then have two different test readers review the different versions and see what they think. 

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