The goal is simple, but executing the goal with success is a challenge we’ve all agonized over. It’s easy to obsess over the beginning and wonder if you’ve started in just the right place with the right scene or narration. Maybe it seems perfect to you, but beta readers tell you it’s not a good enough hook and you try to make it bigger and better, flashier and more action-packed.
Stop.
The opening of a story doesn’t have to be flashy or be a big, attention-grabbing action scene. A good opening holds readers interest because it does one thing very well: it establishes the narrative urgency of the story. It immediately lets your readers in on the most important thing they need to understand in order for this story to take place, feel real, and become true. The opening lays a foundation.
According to literary agent Donald Maass, an opening should accomplish these five things:
1. Establish narrative urgency
2. Evoke a sense of life or death
3. Set the mood or tone
4. Display your main character’s strengths and motivation
5. Ask the big story questions
All in the first few paragraphs or pages. That might sound like a tall order, but it’s amazing what you can pack in a few paragraphs once you pick up the skill. Let’s take a look at an example, the opening three paragraphs of John Green’s book Turtles All the Way Down:
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High school, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time--between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M.--by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them. If those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if the tablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a different topic of conversation that September day, I would’ve met a different end--or at least a different middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.
Hundreds of voices were shouting over one another in the cafeteria, so that the conversation became mere sound, the rushing of a river over rocks. And as I sat beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard.
Now let’s analyse it.
1. What’s the narrative urgency or the one thing the narrator needs you to know right from the beginning? It’s that this character’s life is largely or even entirely out of her control. That’s how she feels about her world, and that’s the central theme of this book, the central thing she has to confront and deal with.
2. Does this opening evoke a sense of life or death? It evokes a sense of life, right? This is what life is to this character, how she perceives it. She says, “I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
3. What is the tone or mood set in this opening? Kinda bleak, angsty, maybe a bit unguided. A tone that carries through the book and helps tell the story.
4. What are this character’s strengths and motivation? Her strength is that she’s perceptive and aware. She knows she’s the canvas, but she wants to be the painter. And that’s ultimately her motivation the entire story, to be able to take control of her life.
5. What big story questions are asked? What is this “fate” she mentions? Does she become the hero of her own personal epic, or does she remain fictional?
The ultimate question is, do you want to keep reading and find out? If you love stories that question the nature of existence and are filled with plenty of angst, of course you do. Or maybe this kind of story isn’t for you, so you don’t. Fair enough. But the opening gave you the big, important details so you were able to determine this right away, and you wouldn’t have known any of this if the story had started right in with the action.
So forget about hooks or trying to grab your readers with a bang. Action and flash without substance are confusing and disorenting, the opposite of what you want to accomplish in your opening. The beginning should be an orientation to the important things your readers need to know and understand right up front. Write that as your opening.
But how exactly do you take all this and turn it into the fabulous opening paragraphs of your story? Here are a few tips:
1. Don’t write the opening of your story first. Chances are, you won’t know the most important thing about your story until you’ve finished it. So start right in with the action and tell the damn story. After it’s written and you know its guiding principle, then go back and write the opening.
2. It doesn’t have to be long. Don’t get preachy about it. Simply express what it is you actually need to express and then get on with the story. Most often, the narrative urgency of the story can be quickly captured. Sure, sometimes it may take a page or two, but if you find yourself droning on, stop and ask if you really need all that. Try to boil it down to the most important thing readers need to know in order to understand the big picture of the story you’re about to tell. It’s an orientation, not an encyclopedia.
3. The opening says a lot about the person telling the story, hopefully your main character. Not all stories are written in the first person, but it still helps to write your opening from the voice and perspective of a main character rather than some disembodied voice or narrator. Keep it as personal as possible because that’s what readers respond to. They judge the perspectives of others against their own and react. This is good. It’s what engages people with a story, so use it to your advantage.
4. These are merely guiding principles to help you write a better opening, but always remember that you can break any established “rule” of narrative or storytelling if you do it with confidence and authority. All of this is to best serve the story, and if the story is best served with out-of-the-box thinking, do it.
Go back and take a look at the beginning of your story. Does the opening accomplish these five things? Or even a few of them? Take some time to analyse it and then experiment with rewriting it in such a way that better captures the narrative urgency of the story you’re ultimately telling.
