Where Does Your Story Begin?

I read a lot of book manuscripts, and I’m here to tell you there are some story openers in danger of being used more often than “once upon a time.”

Here are some beginnings I see quite frequently:

• Character waking up
• Character looking out a window and thinking about the weather
• Character thinking about the setting, reviewing the objects in a room
• Character thinking or saying out loud, “This isn’t happening.”
• Character pondering her life, her appearance (while looking in a mirror), or the day ahead
• When [name] woke up that morning, he never imagined by the end of the day, he would end up [fill in the blank].

I bet you think I’m going to tell you not to write one of these frequently used story openers.

Nope, I’m not going to tell you that.

Go ahead and write “the sitting and thinking” opening

Did you notice that all the openings in my bullet list have a character sitting and thinking alone?

I have a theory about that. What’s the person who is writing that opening doing? Sitting and thinking alone! Maybe that’s why these openings occur to writers so easily.

Here’s a suggestion.

Go ahead and write the sitting and thinking opening, even a common one, if that’s what comes to you immediately. It’s a way for you to get started, a road into the world of your story, a way to initiate the flow of words and ideas.

Intrigue the reader

At the same time, I do want to emphasize is that these story openers are oh-so-common.

So unless you want to blend into the crowd, if you’re going to use one of these openings in your final work, you’ll want to make sure you’ve executed it effectively—in an uncommon way.

Starting a novel with a cliché (“It was love at first sight”) worked out well for Joseph Heller in Catch 22, and the waking-from-a-dream opener (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams…”) made The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka a classic.

But know this: In these two books, the first words, which threaten to be common, lead the reader to words beyond the mundane and towards something intriguing. That’s what is often missing from first paragraphs in some of the draft manuscripts I read that use these common openings. Something that intrigues.

Don’t fret too much about this as you start a draft though.

Getting it right the first time isn’t important

Getting started is important.

Getting in the groove is important.

Completing a draft is important.

Inspiration rarely comes like a a lightning bolt, but it will often come if you allow yourself to get deep into the process of letting words flow.

Often, you won’t even know how your story really begins until you’ve written the ending.

Eventually, after you’ve completed a draft and during revision, I’ll bet you’ll find where your story really begins.  Your characters and you will find it really begins at some point after all that sitting and thinking alone.