An argument can be made that the beginning of any story is the most important. It is the first part your readers will encounter and it is what potential agents and publishers will read in order to determine if your project is right for them. But do you know how to start a story? What's the perfect opening?
The beginning needs to impress your audience. It needs to be near perfect. How can you do that?
5 Essential Elements for How to Start a Story
Though you need to consider every aspect of your story, especially at the beginning, there are five specific things you can watch out for to really make your manuscript shine. Wondering how to start a story? Try these five strategies:
1. Craft that first line
This isn’t something you need to worry about in a first draft, but when you revise, you should pay attention to your first sentence. Make it sing. First impressions are everything.
2. Nix the prologue
Ah, yes, the endless prologue debate. Many authors, agents, and readers alike will give you different advice. Some say prologues don’t bother them and others will say with vehemence that prologues are the worst thing you could do for your story.
The safest thing you can do is not include it at all.
In most cases, the information you include in a prologue can fit in somewhere else as a flashback or an extra chapter. You won’t lose anything by not writing a prologue.
3. Begin your story “in medias res”
If you start your first chapter “in medias res,” or “in the middle of things,” your book will bypass all kinds of pesky backstory and focus on what’s most important. Throw your protagonist straight into the inciting incident. Intrigue and action are key to an interesting beginning.
4. Resist the urge to over explain
I’m guilty of this myself. I naturally want to lay out everything for my reader, describing each and every detail of the rules of my world and my characters before my story has even begun.
This is a surefire way to alienate potential fans. Readers don’t enjoy feeling like someone is teaching them a lesson when they’re just expecting a good story.
Remember that it’s okay to tease a little. Sprinkle information throughout your book instead of dumping it all at the reader’s feet from page one.
5. End the first chapter on a cliffhanger
It’s best if you can do this with every chapter, but the first one is especially important. First chapters are where people either give up on a book or decide to keep going. If you provide a shocking revelation or nail-biting moment, readers will have no choice to but continue with your story to find answers.
A trick some authors use is ending on a cliffhanger and then beginning the next chapter with something completely different so the tension isn’t resolved right away. See what works best for you, but remember to keep the reader on the edge of their seat.
Hook Your Readers
If you’re able to master the art of creating a perfect start to your story, the rest of the editing process will be much easier. Once you’ve hooked a reader, all you have to do is keep reeling them in, so make sure that hook is good and sharp.
Do you have more tips for how to start a story? How do you approach the start of your stories? Let us know in the comments.
PRACTICE
Start a new story (this can be a first chapter or simply the beginning to a short story) using all of the tips above. Write for fifteen minutes, and then end your section on a cliffhanger.
After you’ve finished, share your work in the comments, if you’d like. Remember to give your fellow writers some feedback, too. Have fun!
Hello Magic Violinist. Good advice. I’m at the beginning of my story and 100 percent agree a strong start should equal a dramatically epic ending. And I was also homeschooled( high five)
A professor I am working with on my young adult novel mentioned this to me just the other day.I took his advice on it and now it looks great.
“”That’s not a GIFT. It’s a BRIBE” exploded my husband. An hour earlier I had accepted a freshly caught fish from two of his employees. How was I supposed to know? I guess I still had a lot to learn about African culture. What was I doing in Africa when I was in fact from the west coast of Scotland? Well, I met and married a Nigerian student from Glasgow University. He had gained an engineering degree and having returned home with his new white wife, he had been posted to the main power station in the east of the country. The fish had come from the river which ran beside the power station and provided the cooling water for the turbines. I had become used to accepting that as a white women I seemed automatically to have everyone’s respect, and when it was discovered that I too was a university graduate there seemed no end to the status I was given. – hence my error with the fish. I made many other errors too. I learned to greet people in the local language, but as it was a tonal language I inevitably said ridiculous things when I ventured more than a greeting. Being naturally left handed also brought it’s own cultural dilemas, some curious, others hilarious.
Great start. Makes us eager to hear what they’re bribing her for.
You likely know you’d need to divide this into paragraphs before it’s ready for an editor.
Thanks Christine. They were trying to get to my husband via me – I was not in any danger from them – only from a very irate husband!
Just wanted to say, I found this really intressing and wanted to read more, good work!
I agree. But I want to hear the beliefs about being left-handed. Show, don’t tell. You opened your piece with a bang and got my attention immediately. Excellent.
— Sherrie
Thanks Sherrie. I thought the final statement was my hook (cliffhanger) that would get the reder reading more. Sometime I may have the opportunity to describe and develop the “sinister” theme.
Thank you JKPOP. I do sometimes think of writing a novel. That would be my opening – I think!
“I sure hope Cousin Marcella’s bringing her spiced green bean dish to the Thanksgiving dinner next week. I wonder what makes them so extra delicious.”
Cousin Winnie chuckled. “A special secret ingredients.”
When she chuckled again, Raylene eyed her curiously. “Secret ingredient? Do you know what it is?”
“Oh, I do. But I promised Marcella I’d never tell.”
Winnie took another sip of tea, grinning like the cat that just swallowed the tweetie bird. “Now you have me really curious. It can’t be that much of a secret. After all, there’s only so much you can put in green beans.”
“She said she’d just die if anyone ever found out.”
“Oh, well. I’d never want to cause her that much grief. I won’t ask any more then.”
“Well, maybe she wouldn’t die quite so easy. It wouldn’t be that bad if you knew, too. After all, you’d never tell anyone, right?”
Raylene suppressed a smirk. This was Winnie, after all. She could never resist telling a juicy story. How many people have already heard about this secret ingredient? “I’ll never tell a soul,” she vowed.
“It isn’t a secret ingredient, actually. You might call it a secret process.” Winnie laughed wickedly. “You know Marcella. Always in a hurry. Trust her to find a quick way to drain those blasted beans. But this time her time-saving plan backfired.”
Raylene’s eyes opened wide.
“Good thing I came along right then. She was wringing her hands in sheer desperation, fearing all was lost. So I rescued her precious beans. The story has been our secret ever since.”
This exercise made a nice change of pace. I’ve just finished an important section of my WIP; sometimes switching gears temporarily can be beneficial. Maybe I’ll complete this as a short story when I have time. Reviews are always appreciated!
It was not a good night for escape. Rain splattered away, making the solid ground into impressable mud, and lightning illuminated the sky. But Rosemary had planned all the details of her getaway down to the wire; she had no choice but to leave tonight if she was going to make Montana in time.
The house was silent. Her parents and siblings had gone to bed hours ago. Rosemary dragged herself into a sitting position in bed. No easy feat. The disease had drained away her muscle mass. She was half the weight she’d been a year ago. But she had strength enough for this. Sitting up now, she untaped the line of the IV drip from her arm and pulled out the needle embedded in her skin. She slipped out of the covers. The creak of the floorboards sounded like a roar to her guilty ears, but there were no responding footsteps rushing to her room. Safe. For now.
She had secreted jeans, boots, and a coat under the bed already. She pulled them on, hands shaking. She hadn’t had cause to dress herself in a long time, and her fingers were losing their memory. Still, she managed. Clothed, she was ready for part two. She looked out the window. In a flash of lightning she saw the barn. He was waiting. Now the danger really began.
Brilliant! I was on the edge of my seat the whole time reading. . . I was really impressed by the way you drew me into the story right from the beginning with a succession of images, each one adding another facet to the overall picture. The suspense builds perfectly, even more impressively so for such a short piece. The last paragraph places me as the reader directly into your character’s perspective. Intense. . . love it! You should keep developing this. Would really like to see where you go from here.
Thank you for the feedback! I’m glad you enjoyed reading my practice. Bits of my WIP are scattered around various posts on this site. These are a couple I think are decent: https://thewritepractice.com/rejection-pile/
https://thewritepractice.com/receiving-feedback/?hvid=3xU5bB
It was over. He was gone. A rush of mixed feelings flooded through me as my mind traveled a hundred miles per minute taking in what this means. Heartache for the loss of the man I once loved. Heartbreaking knowing I had to tell our three children their dad was gone. Sadness crept in as well thinking of his poor mother and the rest of his family and how they would take it. Anger settled in. The nerve, how dare he! And then… slowly relief started to come with more tears. How wrong it was of me to feel relief when so many others were going to be hurt over this. No one knew him like I did. They think they did, but they didn’t. He made sure of that. To everyone else he was this amazing guy, good husband, great father, and a wonderful son. Here I am feeling guilty for having a sense of freedom, a sense of relief. As if the chains had finally broken away for good. I reached for my phone to see if he messaged me. Then realized he won’t ever message me again. Never again will I have to dread his calls or his messages. Never again will I have to fear driving down the street or him showing up at my work. It was over.
The gift of any talent it to recognise something that stands out from something you either have said or done. The gift is special to us and not someone else or something we can emulate that’s not ours In the first place. To write a begging is to dart the emagination and start a story anyway we please. Then, see if there is a line that throws the character/s into a predicament. Now take that predicament and make it a chapter… you have now made a great beginning that should effortlessly run from conflict to the original start of a story. If a bent penny is the definition of agony start the story with the actual incident not the coin.
When, on what she would always remember as the worst night of her young, short life, Maria Twill walked through the door into the room at 3 a.m., the party was still going strong. The air was tinged with a haze of pungent smoke. She saw the usual crowd, slouched in various states of disarray on the sofa and several chairs scattered in rough circle about the coffee table. They looked as if they didn’t have much longer to live. Rodney’s pale skin was splotched and grey, hanging slack from his once high cheekbones. He was sunk low in the broken springs of a chair covered in fraying, faded upholstery. One leg had broken off, so that it tilted at an angle toward the floor. His right leg was slung as if in counterbalance over the chair arm. His current girlfriend, Lisa, lay curled up on the floor, leaning with her back between his legs. Her bleary, glazed eyes stared up toward the ceiling, sightlessly, where the ceiling fan swung loosely as it revolved in erratic ellipses, it’s base still secured to the ceiling by only two screws. She could imagine it coming loose with a crash, tumbling to the floor and shattering the glass coffee table beneath it.
She moved toward the kitchen where she saw Tomas and Tiffany seated at the scuffed linoleum table. She walked in and sat down on one of the rickety wooden chairs. A pot on the stove bubbled and looked about ready to boil over. She reached over and shut off the gas. Then leaned back in the chair, almost falling backwards when one of the chair legs shifted beneath her. She quickly righted herself and settled the chair more securely with all four of the chair legs on the floor. Tomas dragged deeply on a cigarette and tapped the ash into a beer bottle grimy with ash and half filled with soggy butts. She could smell the death in the air. Nothing surely lasted forever, but her friends all seemed bent on speeding their way toward that moment of imminent revelation and the unknown invisible epilogue to their individual stories. The sorrow of it all struck her heavily as she sat there, suddenly very aware of the tentative and fleeting nature of each passing moment. It was at that moment that she saw the gun in Tomas hand. The shock of it took her breath away.
Great imagery! I can really picture the people in this room from your word choice. I would suggest varying your sentence length a little, but other than that well done!
Description is vivid. You include excellent details. And you give us a ‘cliff hanger’ in the last bit. I would suggest unpacking the first sentence. I like the use of a short, then long, then short sentence to give ppunch. Just my thoughts.
You create a vivid scene and ‘hook’ me. I want to read more.
— Sherrie
Thanks for that! Will start paying closer attention to sentence variations. . .
I want to be become a Writer why make A story about my life and other people do they love and respect if you could change one thing about yourself better person do different way your Path is for everyone has to know
Many thanks for your post on how to start a story. All five points are important but I think that # 3 is my absolute ‘must’.
I’m trying to create a brand new piece, without having preplanned it.
Footsteps… footsteps. ‘maybe i’m imagining them,’ Sue thinks, as she walks down the dimly lit street, alone. She looks around, trying to keep her fantasy in check and trying not to look behind. The sound of footsteps persists.’Perhaps it’s the echo of my own steps,’ she thinks, and stops to listen. Sure enough, the sound stops. She clutches her coat about her and hasten her pace. There again, the sound of footsteps. They seem to gaining on her. Her heart races. She recalls Bob’s words, ‘when you’re alone and it seems as if someone’s following you, never look back. Convince yourself that it’s only your imagination and that nobody’s following you. Or you can turn round and say hi!’
Sue is in a dither. There’s another half mile to home. She truns around and says ‘hi’ in a soft tone.
‘I was wondering when you’d notice me,’ came the answer.
The voice had a hollow, uncanny sound. It was neither high pitched or low. She could not say if it was a male or female voice.
Suddenly she felt a grip on her hair. She was yanked back and a big, icy hand covered her mouth, stifile her scream..
Well, here you go, fellow scribblers. Do you have any suggestions about the short ‘prologue’ I used to start the piece. Too long or Move it?? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
— Sherrie
“Under the Stones” working title
Frost
runs deep in Northern Michigan. Long winters drive the cold through the rich,
dark soil, and warm spring winds invite
weathered field stones to the surface like buried secrets.
Every mud season, the Bailey boys
filled the beds of trucks with hundreds of those newly surfaced haybine
killers. One missed rock could dull a sharpened shear or crack the binding
gears. Then those stones became a house, shed, or wall like the one next to the
ancient oak stump between the two main pastures.
All
summer long berry vines struggled up through the heaps of stones. This strip of
land had been grazed but never tilled. A grove of oaks and maples, left as a
windbreak, housed families of squirrels. They grew fat in the fall off the
berries sprinkled across the stones and the acorns scattered under the oaks and
in the crevices between the stones.
It
had been a crisp morning. She slipped on her flannel shirt against the
lingering chill. A four quart metal pail swung from her elbow. She breathed in
the farm, scents of wet soil and alfalfa mixed with manure and dying leaves.
Contentment filled her. She sang one of her grandmother’s prayers as she
trekked to the far end of the pasture for the blackberries weaving their way
through the piles of rocks picked from the hay fields.
Squatting, nimble fingers found the
ripest berries. Her fingers became stained from the ones that burst at a touch.
She popped those into her mouth, and dark, sweet juice oozed onto her full lips.
A cracking branch startled her, and
she sprang forward. Her precious berries scattered over the ground as her
shriek cut the air. He loomed over her limp body, her dark hair marred with
globs the color of sumac. She rolled down the stump and landed on her back.
Arms spread out and legs wedged together. In her jeans and blue blouse, the
flannel shirt spread out behind her head like wings, she looked like a blue
angel.
The
massive man stood over her. Panicked by her staring brown eyes, he grabbed at
the pile of rocks riddled with berry vines and threw them on her body. At
first, they sounded like a fist hitting a drum, but, soon, the stones clanged
one against another like a tolling bell. Sweat drenched his shirt by the time
the stones became a three-foot tall barrier between the pastures.
He stepped back and surveyed the
ground. His heart pounded. He wrenched his eyes away from the rocks and scanned
the two pastures. Had anyone seen him?
Black
and white hides moved lazily across the field or dotted the pasture to his
west. Dapple grey horses grazed in the pasture to the east. Nothing moved near
the barn or house. He gasped for air and his chest rattled. He strode off,
turned back to survey the ground for any fragments of brown skin or blue cloth.
He had covered her completely. None of the family would ever know,
“What the hell is she doing here?”
Abi glances up to see Haylee standing in the doorway. She hasn’t seen her in three years. The little girl has blossomed into a young woman. With more hair on her head than skin and muscle on her skeleton, she looks like a princess who escaped from Disney world into the real one.
“Hi, Haylee.” She has never had an issue with Haylee. She’s actually the one person among her relatives whom Abi has managed to tolerate. Somewhat.
“Don’t ‘hi, Haylee’ me.” The girl crosses her arms as only a teenager can, and click-clacks on high heels to her father. She plants an overly pretentious kiss on his check.
Abi lifts an eyebrow and John eyes her while Haylee tucks a string of white hair behind his ear. “She picked up her strong spirit from you.” He says, and winks. Abi rolls her eyes.
“There’s a different between exhibiting a strong spirit and being bitchy.”
“I’d rather be a bitch than a w…”
“That’s enough.” John shifts himself upright with a grunt. “Abi, I’m sure that nurse from earlier would not identify you behaviour toward her as strong spirited.”
Haylee develops a witch-like smile. “And you!” John points directly at her, “You’re getting too damn big for your shoes, child.”
Silence fills the room as John continues to point at Haylee. He has become soft but he hasn’t lost his authority. He has always demanded respect. Haylee’s frightened gaze shifts to Abi and changes to anger. She tucks a thick string of golden, wavy hair behind her ear and then crosses her thin arms.
“Daddy, I need eight hundred bucks.”
“What on earth for?” He looks up at her with anger, “You are sixteen years old.”
“You have no trouble throwing thousands at… that!” Haylee points to Abi. At this, Abi calmly gets up from the sofa-chair and starts walking toward the door.
“Don’t be disrespectful, Haylee.” John tries with a calm voice this time, “Abigail, please…I haven’t seen you in over a year, my girl.”
“I’m being disrespectful?! She treats everyone like crap and gets away with it…but you’re telling me not to be disrespectful?!” Haylee’s voice still picks up an irritating pitch when she gets upset, it’s been that way since she could talk.
The last thing Abi hears as she walks down the hallway is a faint “Abigail” from her father. The further she moves down the hallway, the more her mood lifts. She’s been dreading this senseless meeting with John for three days. Couldn’t he just have called me? She shakes her head in irritation.
She walked through the doorway into the kitchen where she saw Tomas and Tiffany seated at the scuffed linoleum table and sat down on one of the rickety wooden chairs. A pot on the stove bubbled and looked about ready to boil over.
http://www.emetechnologies.com/industrial-training-in-chandigarh/6-months-cse-training-in-chandigarh-&-mohali.php
Dear Joe,
Thank you again for all these helpful tips. I’d like to write a story following your tips and post it here later. But I’ve a doubt here – by writing about a story do you mean a novel or a story in particular? You tell us that if the chapter ends on a cliff-hanger, the reader will automatically feel like turning over the page to the next chapter and so on. Most of the stories i have read, stories written by the great story writers of yesteryear like Maupassant, Somerset Maugham, Chekhov, O. Henry, Pope or the modern greats like Roald Dahl, Leena Cockley and so on; do not run for more than 2/3 pages. So the question of the story being written in chapters, simply does not arise. Modern people are busy people, they have very little time for long stories.
The opening sentence is very important, no doubt.But then one doesn’t have to go on scratching one’s head thinking about an eye-catching opening sentence. Once you have the story line clear in your head, your story will fall into place. Now when I ask my class not to begin their stories with a hackneyed opening line like: Long long ago there lived a …, i may be wrong about it. Even a novice story-teller can change his story into something really interesting just by adding a few interesting words like – Long long ago there lived this most queer human you have ever heard of. Instead of ‘queer’, you can also use words like ‘pathetic’, ‘money-crazy’ or even ‘murderous’. For a novice story writer like a student trying her hand at story-writing, this may not be a bad idea at all.
Anyway, truth to tell, i’ve written some stories in my life and despite all the advice I’ve drawn from books regarding story writing, i seem to forget it all the moment I start writing. Very seldom I’m able to stick to the basic story idea. By the time i finish writing, the story’s undergone a complete metamorphosis of some sort.
I dragged my cart behind me down the corridor, it’s old wheels rattling on the glass tiles forming the bridge between one side of the building and the other. My job was a pretty quiet and lonesome one, but that was how I often preferred to spend my time anyways. Slowly, I made my way to the first cubicle. Stepping in, I grabbed the wastebasket and dumped out the papers in it. A long string of brown slime trailed out of it, splattering on the edge of my cart and the fingers of my left hand. “Ack!” I quietly grunted in surprise and disgust. I’m not squeamish or anything, but there’s not much worse than knowing that some obese chair-swiveler’s tobacco-stained spit has just landed on you. I pulled off a piece of paper towel on the roll on my cart and wiped my hand off as best I could before reaching for the small bottle of hand sanitizer in the pocket of the Rubbermaid sack on the front.
Rubbing my hands, I half sarcastically remarked to myself, “I love my job”.
I had become used to accepting that as a white women I seemed
automatically to have everyone’s respect, and when it was discovered
that I too was a university graduate there seemed no end to the status I
was given. – hence my error with the fish.
http://www.emetechnologies.com/industrial-training-in-chandigarh/6-months-mechanical-engineering-training-in-chandigarh-&-mohali.php