Beginnings

You have a story to tell.  Maybe your story is already plotted out in your head with every plot point in place and every character arc mapped.  Maybe you just plan to start writing and see how things go.  Either way, you have a decision to make: where do you begin?

All stories, we are told, need a beginning, a middle and an end. It sounds simple.  Yet starting the story can be one of the most difficult decisions a writer makes.  A poor start might mean a potential reader never travels past that first sentence.  A brilliant start can hook the reader and propel them into the story, eager to know more.  The start of your story matters.  The stakes are high.

Storytellers have been struggling with this problem since stories began.  Sometimes the answer was to come up with a phrase which was repeated so often it became a cliché: “Once upon a time...” or “A long time ago...”  Neither of these tell us anything about the story to come.  They are simply ways of alerting us to the fact that a story is about to be told.  They are a call for our attention but are now so over familiar that they no longer engage us.  Unless there is a twist.

The standard opening to Star Wars gives us an interesting twist:
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...”
The story is set in the past, which is a surprise as it concerns space ships and robots and galactic empire, all things we associate with tales of the future.  So this traditional opener is given a new life and we are hooked.

The opening to Shrek gives us a similar twist.  It starts with a book where we read the opening line  to so many fairy tales:
“Once upon a time there was a lovely princess...”
We all know how that story goes.  The hero kills the ogre and marries the princess.  But this fairy tale, we quickly learn, is told from the ogre’s point of view.  If he is the hero, the story is not going to follow the recipe that we have come to expect.  Again, our curiosity is piqued and we want to know more.  Another successful hook.

What does this tell us?  A reader does not want a predictable opening.  A reader is looking for something different, for something to make reading your story worth their time.  So your opening has to be a promise of a fascinating story to come.  Anything less is a waste of ink.
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How to achieve this?  One method is to set up an expectation and then give it a twist, exactly like the examples above.  George Orwell’s opening to 1984 is a masterpiece at subverting our expectations:
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
We know about clocks.  We know they never strike thirteen.  We’re hooked.

J M Barrie’s opening to Peter Pan begins:
"All children, except one, grow up."
This gives the reader a double whammy.  It confounds our expectations that all children grow up and sets up questions in the reader’s mind.  Who is this child?  Why does he or she never grow up?  Openings that set up a question in the reader’s mind always work well because, if there is a question, the reader will want to read on to discover the answers.

Actually, Peter Pan’s opening is a triple whammy - it not only plants a question and messes with our expectations, it also introduces the major character.  Introducing a main character in the opening is an effective way to bond the reader to that person’s story.  C S Lewis opens The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with:
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
The author simultaneously introduces Eustace and alerts us to the fact that he is not a nice boy.  We are intrigued.  Who is he and why is an unpleasant person given prominence at the start of the story?  More questions.  More reasons to read on.

Charles Dickens’ opening to A Christmas Carol goes further, by introducing us to a character who is no longer alive:
“Marley was dead, to begin with.”
The reader not only wants to know who he is and why he is important to the story but is also being primed for the key element of the tale: the dead will return, as a ghost, to haunt the main character.  Another twist.

If you are stuck for a really great beginning to your story, you could do worse than play around with one of these ideas.
Create a twist, subvert reader expectations.
Set up a question the reader wants answering.
Introduce a main character and give the reader a reason to root for or to dislike that person.

If you can create an opening which does all three and gives a sense of imminent doom then you’ve got a zinger of an opening:
“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”
Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club.
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Now all you need to do is write the story to go with it.  Good luck!

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