As writers, we may find ourselves asking, “Why is it so hard to start?”
And we don’t just mean the writing part. That’s hard too, as our prolific Facebook activity log, empty coffeepot, and suspiciously clean piles of laundry will attest. (Nobody can houseclean like a procrastinating writer.) We mean actually starting the story.
Long explanations. Chapters of backstory. Characters sitting and thinking—about the past, the present, the future. Actions that lead nowhere.
When we consider the immensity of history, information, and world creation most writers are trying to fit into two hundred or more pages, it’s not surprising we need to work up to our stories. But readers won’t toil through pages of preparation, information, or meditation before the story really begins. They need to engage, to get immersed in the action and become intimate with the characters quickly. Some say within the first page.
So when you edit, it’s time to take a hard look at your opening. Begin in media res—get to the good part. Engage readers right away through dialogue and relevant action, all of it building up the scene’s purpose. Raise questions. Use characters and emotion to invest actions with meaning. Stir up tension. Intrigue. Mystery. Excitement. Create a big bang.
Find where your story begins, and do as the king in Wonderland once told Alice: begin there.
Getting to the Story
Because our stories don’t actually spring full-fledged from our pens or keyboards, we writers need time to ease into them, and so a lot of our drafts open in one of these ways:
• With a lot of description, most often of the weather.
• With backstory or explanation of what’s about to happen.
• With a character thinking or reminiscing. (This does not qualify as “something happening.” In fact, the state of thinking can be notably less active and interesting than even the weather.)
• With a character doing a lot of mundane things before getting to anything pertinent to the story.
And then, finally, we write our way up to where the story really takes off—several paragraphs or even whole chapters after we begin.
The problem here is that while we are getting warmed up, readers are trying to enter the story world—and if they can’t get in soon enough, if the opening bores them or feels irrelevant or rambling, they are liable to move on before we do. All the way to a different book.
Take this opening for a suspense novel:
Before:
It was a gray, rainy day. The drizzle had started that morning and not ceased. By now puddles had formed around the storm drains and headlights glared off the wet pavement. The clouds overhead were thick and flat like a heavy blanket lying over the entire city, with no break anywhere for the sun to come through, even though it was only midafternoon.
Cars passed by in single file, following each other too closely and honking when the traffic got tighter. Skyscrapers rose on every side, their sides gleaming black and mirroring the traffic flow. On the corner of Smyth and Davidson, patrons snaked out the door of the local Starbucks, some shielding their heads with umbrellas while others pulled collars up and shivered in the dampness. Across the street was a drugstore, and a lone homeless man sat by a fire hydrant on the corner, his cardboard sign waterlogged and its markered plea for help running down in black streaks.
It was the kind of day that was typical in the Midwest in March. It made people unhappy, depressed, wishing they were at home watching TV instead of going to work, driving through town, dealing with one more gray day after a long and oppressive winter.
The winter days never seemed to end. Daylight Savings Time had cut the days off at their knees all the way back in November, and ever since it was one dark, cold, snowy, damp, drizzly day after another. Eventually winter started to lighten into spring, but it was March spring—the kind that’s so cold and damp and dark in its own right that it hardly seems like an improvement.
Casey Miller’s gun hand shook as she stared down at the body, rain-soaked and pale on the sidewalk.
After:
Casey Miller’s gun hand shook as she stared down at the body, rain-soaked and pale on the sidewalk.
The Before example isn’t bad writing. It’s got some vivid images, in fact, and mood-setters. But the story does not start until Casey Miller looks down on that body, and readers are unlikely to stick with a page-and-a-quarter’s worth of description long enough to get there. Can some of the setting details be included after the fact? Sure. In fact, if you open with something happening, you can cut back to scene details to create contrast and make the ugly opening words starker:
Casey Miller’s gun hand shook as she stared down at the body, rain-soaked and pale on the sidewalk.
Skyscrapers rose into a heavy, clouded sky all around them; patrons, holding umbrellas or pulling up their collars against the cold rain, snaked out the door of the Starbucks across the street. Cars passed in single file, honking impatiently, splashing the rain in the gutters.
No one else saw him.
He was dead, and only she could see.
In place of remarks about the weather, we now have two characters—one alive, one dead—a vivid setting, and a mystery. All in less time than the Before passage took to describe March in the city. We’ve found the story. And more importantly, so have our readers.
Any questions?
And while you're contemplating where YOUR story starts, go ahead and share some great openings that you have written or read.
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