write-story-opening

Write Story Opening

Write a story opening that establishes a specific character in a specific situation with implied tension — using concrete detail, immediate scene, and forward momentum to compel the reader past the first page.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Stephen King's "On Writing" is the most widely read craft memoir in contemporary fiction writing; his advice on first sentences is implemented in Clarion, Odyssey, and virtually all MFA creative writing programs. John Gardner's "The Art of Fiction" is the academic standard for narrative technique. Nathan Bransford's former literary agency and current blog have documented submission patterns showing that most manuscripts are rejected in the first page. Impact: Literary agents and editors make acquisition decisions based primarily on the opening pages; reader retention on Amazon shows that books from which readers "look inside" and read the opening are downloaded at dramatically higher rates if the opening compels forward reading. The opening's function is singular: make the reader want to know what happens next. Everything else — backstory, world-building, character history — is subordinate to this one function.

Steps

1. Begin in scene — not summary, not backstory

The most common opening failure: starting before the story begins

• Begin with: a specific character in a specific place at a specific moment doing something
• Avoid: backstory (what happened before the story begins), exposition (general information about the world or character's history), or abstract thematic statements

In scene means the camera is running: we see, hear, and feel what the character experiences in the present moment. Summary (the character had always been afraid of water) is not scene; the character standing at the pool's edge, her toes curling over the tile, watching the water shift — that is scene.

First line test: does the first line put us in a specific place with a specific character experiencing something? If the first line is background information or abstract scene-setting, the story starts one paragraph later.

2. Establish a specific character with specific stakes

Readers invest in characters who want something and are in danger of not getting it:

• Want: what does this character want in this scene? (Not globally — in this moment.) "She wanted to cross the bridge before dark" is more immediate than "She had always wanted freedom."
• Stakes: what does the character risk? Stakes create the tension that drives reading. No stakes = no tension = no forward momentum.
• Specific, concrete character detail: one or two sharp details that reveal character are more effective than a physical description; how the character notices things, what they focus on, what they say reveals who they are

Vonnegut's first rule of creative writing: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he will not feel the time was wasted." The opening must immediately establish that something interesting is happening to someone specific.

3. Imply the central tension without explaining it

The best openings establish what the story is about without stating it:

• The central conflict (character vs. character, character vs. world, character vs. self) should be visible in the opening scene
• Show, don't state: "John was nervous" states an emotion; "John checked the lock three times before sitting down" shows it; "The security guard's eyebrow lifted as John approached the desk, and John's rehearsed smile felt suddenly plastic" both shows and implies conflict

Chekhov's opening principle: every significant element in the opening should connect to the story's central concerns; details that establish setting but have no relationship to anything that follows are wasted; the image that opens the story should resonate with the story's ending

4. Control pacing with sentence structure

Sentence structure is pacing:

• Short, declarative sentences: fast; urgent; action; tension
• Long, comma-heavy sentences: slower; reflective; luxurious; building atmosphere
• Fragment sentences. Like this. Even shorter. More urgent.

Opening rhythm: most effective openings begin at a medium to fast pace; they do not start with long atmospheric paragraphs before anything happens; atmospheric opening paragraphs (a long description of weather, landscape, history) signal to the reader that nothing interesting will happen for several pages

The opening sentence: famous opening sentences (Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; Nabokov: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins"; Orwell: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen") work because they immediately create a voice, establish a world, or raise a question. The first sentence should do at least one of these.

5. Avoid the common opening failures

The weather opening: "It was a dark and stormy night" — opening with weather description as the primary establishing element signals inert, undramatic writing; weather as context only (entering the rain on the way into a confrontation) is different from weather as the point

The dream opening: establishing an opening scene then revealing it was a dream is a cliché that breaks reader trust; the scene evaporated was false tension

The retrospective summary opening: "After everything that had happened, I suppose it started with..." — this opening form creates distance rather than immediacy; put the camera in the scene

The too-much-backstory opening: spending the first three pages establishing what happened before the story begins before showing us anything in present time loses readers who have no stake yet in the characters

Character waking up: unless the waking-up scene is itself the site of conflict or revelation, it is one of the most clichéd and low-stakes openings in fiction; begin later in the day

Common Mistakes

• Starting with the best line in the paragraph as the first line: the first line should be the single best line in the opening; rearranging to lead with the sharpest sentence often transforms a flat opening into a compelling one
• Describing the character from the outside before the character does anything: a paragraph describing what the character looks like before we've seen them act or think puts the reader at remove; show us the character doing something; we'll infer appearance from action
• Over-explaining the context before the action: context should emerge from action; a reader who doesn't understand what's happening yet will keep reading because the action is interesting; a reader who has been briefed on the context before anything happens has been told they need to be briefed before this gets interesting — that's not the message to send

When NOT to Use

• Experimental fiction that intentionally violates narrative convention: avant-garde fiction, stream-of-consciousness work, and metafiction deliberately subvert conventional opening techniques; the guidelines here apply to broadly conventional narrative fiction and should be violated intentionally and with craft, not accidentally.