The 10 Best Ways to Start a Story

Realism in SFF Update: Well, That Was a Weekend

The 10 Best Ways to Start a Story

This is the title of an Archon panel: The Ten Best Ways to Start a Story

I think this is somewhat funny … all right, it’s right on the edge of hilarious … because ten best ways, what could that mean in this context?

1) Open the novel with an engaging sentence, paragraph, scene, and chapter.

2) Something else. What?

Or maybe

1) Open with action

2) Open quietly

And then where do you go from there? Also, no one cares whether the novel opens with explosions or with a guy waking up in the morning, as long as the opening is engaging. Literally nothing matters other than “opening is engaging.” We’ve all heard the advice: start with action, drop the reader in media res. But an explosion on page one won’t matter if we don’t have context and a reason to care.

On the other hand, lists are kind of appealing as a structure for a post, so you know what, sure, let’s look at

The Ten Best Ways to Open a Novel (tm).

1) With action, and let us remember that it’s hard to open with violent, fast-paced action while simultaneously building the context and the characters. This kind of opening, which everyone treats as The Way It Should Be Done, is in fact difficult, and a turn off for a good many readers.

2) With a giant explosion or something similar, but your character is at a distance. You’re doing more with context up front, or if not, then this is even more difficult than smaller-scale action.

3) Quietly, and make your gentle opening engaging, meaning you will most likely be showing at least one character and at least some setting and a significant amount of context. Plus write the opening with enough skill that it’s engaging.

4) With someone waking up. I mean, this is a cliched style of terrible opening, but if you make it EXTRA ENGAGING, it can and will work.

5) With someone looking into a mirror. As with the above example, this is terribly cliched, but if you do it EXTREMELY WELL, it can and will work.

6) With scenery, plus a character in the scene. I’m a fan of scenery, but it is easier to pull this off if there’s a character present.

7) With pure scenery, and given that you aren’t including the main character up front, this will take even more skill.

8) With a prologue! An engaging prologue, of course. Keep in mind that you have to engage your reader twice: first with the prologue and again with chapter one. Are you sure your prologue is crucial enough to make this worthwhile?

9) With a prologue in which someone gets tortured to death. Wait, just kidding! That’s a TERRIBLE WAY to open a book. Even if you’re extremely skilled as an author, plenty of readers (Hi!) will find it extremely difficult to get past this prologue.

10) The most typical way to actually write an opening that works is to start with a character, in a situation that presents a problem, in the physical world of the story. The character is a real person. The situation presents a real problem. The world around the character is a real place. Creating the sense of reality takes skill.

Creating a sense that the story is a real story, happening to real people, in a real place, always takes skill. Any opening situation can work. Setting, character, situation, explosion, whatever you want to emphasize in your opening, it can all work in the hands of a skilled author. Nothing will work if the author is not skilled. This is why I’m not a fan of checklists or rules. Advice such as start in media res is pointless unless the author is skilled with tone, style, pacing, voice, all the rest of it. You could outline All Systems Red and hand that outline to a class of novice writers, and how many do you think would write a character as engaging and memorable as Murderbot?

Here’s a random selection of great opening paragraphs. These are not the same as the various novels linked above, by the way. Those are good openings as well. These various novels don’t have a lot in common except they are all engaging from the first paragraph. The only rule is that in order to engage the reader’s attention, the opening must be engaging. That’s it. That’s the rule. And even then, no opening will engage every reader’s attention.

***

The sun is always about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location, pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bioleaching metallophytes, quickly scraping away any accumulated residues of gold or tungsten or uranium. But most of them are out there to catch glimpses of the sun.

– 2312, KSR

***

An April night in Atlanta between thunderstorms: dark and warm and wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azaliea blossoms. Nearly midnight. I had been walking for over an hour, covering four or five miles. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t sleepy.You would think that my bad dreams would be of the first man I had killed, thirteen years ago. Or if not him, then maybe the teenager who had burned to death in front of me because I was too slow to get the man with the match. But no, when I turn out the lights at ten o’clock and can’t keep still, can’t even bear to sit down in my Lake Claire house, it’s because I see again the first body I hadn’t killed.

– The Blue Place, Nicola Griffith

***

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of the Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

— Welcome to Temptation, Cruisie and Mayer

***

Every time the door into the front office of The Q opened, the sounds of Gainsford Street, business hub of Rhysdon, would come tumbling in on the heels of whoever entered. Clicking, turning, marking time, the rush and flow of the patrons was like the working gears of humanity’s clock. These sounds all transformed neatly into the mechanics of The Q. And, perched on a stool behind the front counter, conducting her business – waiting upon customers, efficiently taking questions for the next edition, tidying figures and markets and profits down to each percentage and comma and dot – sat Miss Quincy St. Claire, chief officer of operations, self-appointed auditor of all accounts, final editor overseeing the team of typesetters, proffers, and printers, and, in general, the central gear in the workings of her great-uncle’s business.

–The Q, Beth Brower

***

His first view of the outside was through the small, fan-shaped window of the basement apartment. He would climb up on the table and spend hours peering through the bars at the legs and feet of people passing by on the sidewalk, his child’s mind falling still in contemplation of the ever-changing rhythms and tempos of legs and feet moving across his field of vision. An old woman with thin calves, a kid in sneakers, men in wingtips, women in high heels, the shiny brown shoes of soldiers. If anyone paused he could see detail – straps, eyelets, a worn heel, or cracked leather with the sock showing through – but it was the movement that he liked, the passing parade of color and motion. No thoughts in his head as he stood or knelt at the window, but rather, from the images of motion, a pure impression of purposefulness. Something was going on outside. People were going places. Often, as he turned away from the window, he would muse on dimly sensed concepts of direction, volition, change, and the existence of the unseen. He was six years old, and much of his thinking, especially when he was alone, went on without words, went on beneath the level of language.

The apartment was small and dark, and he was locked inside until that terrific moment each day when his mother came home with her taxicab. He understood about the cab. There were passengers. She picked them up in the street and took them from one place to another (as the people walking outside were going from one place to another), but she herself had no destination.. She went where the passengers told her to go, and remained, in a sense, a witness, like himself. The cab started out in front of the apartment in the morning and returned at night. It appeared to him to be going around in circles.

–Soul & Body, Frank Conroy

***

There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smuggler’s town. You shouldn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing. And you probably shouldn’t be in it for the money. Smugglers are always going to flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today.

–-Greenglass House, Kate Mitford

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