I blame Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, she sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She makes it sound so easy, doesn’t she? Turns out, good beginnings are a lot harder to write than she led me to believe. I’m never taking writing advice from a singing nanny on a mountaintop again. (Probably.)
Why is her advice so misleading? It’s because there isn’t just one beginning. There are a limitless number of possible beginnings for every story. The problem is how to choose the best beginning out of all those possibilities.
Too often, authors may think “the beginning” means all the background stuff that happened before the story picks up and gets interesting. Unfortunately, in this era of short attention spans, myriad forms of competing entertainment, and expectations of instant gratification, that’s probably not the best way to kick things off.
I’ve heard editors describe the best point of entry into a story as “coming fashionably late to the party.” This means you don’t arrive while the host is still setting up the chairs and cooking the hors d’oeuvres. It means you arrive when the party is just about to hit full swing and things are already starting to heat up.
For example, the prologue in Mark Steven’s The Fireballer starts with our protagonist as a boy, peering in through the fence at a baseball park, trying to resist the temptation to play because he fears something about the game. Of course, when a fly ball heads his way, he catches it barehanded, fires it perfectly at the catcher… then picks up his backpack and runs away.
We’ve arrived a little late to the party, haven’t we? We don’t know why this obviously talented kid won’t play the game he’s good at. We’re dying to ask someone “what did I miss?,” but even if we did, we would wave them to be silent because we don’t want to miss what happens next. This was a perfect place for us to enter this story. Sure, we have a few questions, but we’ve already seen enough of this kid and his dilemma that we’re hooked. The author dropped us directly into a turning-point day in this ballplayer’s life, and we’re left a little breathless, anxious to see what happens next.
In the novel Bullet Train, by Kotaro Isaka (you may have seen the movie, but the book is even more remarkable), we start with a man named Yuichi boarding a bullet train in Tokyo. Yuichi has a handgun in his coat pocket, and he’s telling himself he’s quit drinking, his hands aren’t shaking, and whoever pushed his 6-year-old son off a building needs to pay.
And just like that, we’re on that train, holding our breath, worrying about Yuichi, his son, and his gun.
Again, we’ve arrived a little late to the party, so we’re not caught up on all the details yet, but they’re already playing our favorite song, there’s a beer in our hand (how did that get there?), and our feet are headed straight for the dance floor.
Arriving after the party is winding down (or worse, over!) is just as bad as arriving too early. The last thing you want is to hear about the lampshade-wearing, chandelier-trapezing, petunia-puking antics of partygoers after the fact. Wouldn’t you rather see that happening than be told about it later? Don’t let the exciting catalyst of your story happen off-stage. Bring it onstage and let us see it unfold right before us.
I met an author once whose story started with the hero driving in his car, thinking about a crime he had just committed: stealing a body from a morgue. What a missed opportunity! As a reader, I don’t want to watch this protagonist remember that event while on a boring car ride. I want to experience it! I want to feel his heart pound as he breaks into the morgue. I want to smell the chemicals, be spooked by the bodies under sheets, and maybe even jump when a lifeless hand flops against our hero’s leg! The author revised his opening to begin directly in the morgue scene, and within a week he had a full request from an agent.
So as you think about how your story opens, are you making us watch the party host set out the decorations, assemble the canapes, and wipe the water spots from the glassware? Or did the exciting catalyst of the story already happen off-stage, and we came to the party too late, after the good parts were over?
Remember, we want to arrive fashionably late: not so early that we have to sit around bored until the other fun kids turn up, and not so late that we miss the juicy stuff that the fun kids did before we got there. Land us in that sweet spot, when we walk in the door just as the fun kids are hit with that crazy notion and raise an eyebrow at us in a conspiratorial invitation to join them. We may have questions, but we’ll discover the answers to those later. Right now, we want to meet the fun kids’ eyes and yell, “I’m in!”
[Photo by Adam Whitlock on Unsplash]