Top 10 Ways Not to Start a Story

Story beginnings are challenging. On the one hand, you’ve got all the excitement of getting to know your characters and their dilemmas for the first time, and you haven’t yet hit the point where flaws begin to raise their thorny heads. Ah, young love!

On the other hand, those first-draft opening pages are seldom the story’s true beginning. And if they are, they still need a lot of refinement. Why? Because we seldom fully understand what our story is about until it’s finished.

The first drafts of our story openings are how we began the journey of learning what our story ultimately would be about. As we’ve written, we’ve grown with our characters. We’ve explored internal and external conflicts that likely transformed in the telling. Subplots rose, died, were resurrected in new forms. Characters merged, disappeared, or swapped importance. No matter how detailed your outline was at the start, you’ve no doubt altered your path in a thousand different ways—some small, some significant.

So, when you finish your first draft, it’s time to go back and take a long, hard look at your beginning pages.

That doesn’t mean you should agonize over your beginnings when you’re first starting the story. At that first blush of inspiration, jump into the creative stream wherever you can, knowing that you’ll paddle back later. Just let the words land on the page however they fall, then let the story build from there.

Take the pressure off during the first draft, and remind yourself you’ve got plenty of time to go back later to adjust those opening pages.

Then make yourself do it.

I’ve done a fair amount of judging for various writing contests. After a while, I noticed some common tropes that writers sometimes fall back on to introduce their stories. Maybe they read one like it and it got caught in their brain as being “the way to write a story,” or they tried it once in a writing course as an exercise, or they just couldn’t think of anything better. Like I said, this is okay in a first draft, but it will be ripe for the scythe when you start revising.

I’ve identified some of the story beginnings that I’ve seen far too many times. If you’ve using one of these openings, you might want to look for a fresh beginning to your story instead—not because it’s bad, but because it’s been overused. And because you know your story better now than when you first wrote those words. Hook us with something we haven’t already read a dozen (or a hundred) times, and we’ll follow you anywhere.

Feel free to ignore these tips until you’re in revision mode, or go ahead and embrace them as you start your journey. That’s up to you.

With all of this in mind, here are my top 10 ways not to start your story. If you have more suggestions for openings to avoid, add them in the Comments below!

1. In a dream.
2. Looking at a photograph.
3. Looking in a mirror.
4. In the main character’s backstory. We can learn their history later, if it matters, but don’t start with a history lesson!
5. On an ordinary day, when nothing unusual is happening, and things aren’t about to change.
6. With a long description that might show us the setting but doesn’t introduce us to the character or their problem. This used to work, but modern readers don’t have the patience for it anymore.
7. With the focus on a character who turns out not to be the main character.
8. Right after something interesting has happened. Example: “As I walked away from the bank, I couldn’t stop thinking about how betrayed I felt when Dan took off in the getaway car without me.” We want to see the heist go wrong; we don’t want to hear about it after the fact.
9. With a cliché.
10. With a variation—no matter how modern—of “Once upon a time.” It worked brilliantly for Star Wars, but now we readers want something new.

[Photo by Jannis Edelmann on Unsplash]