How to Write Great Beginnings
Make Every Word Count
In a story’s beginning, you need to make every word count.
A story’s beginning isn’t about flowery language. A story’s beginning is meant to be specific and use details to grab the reader into the story.
Yes, yes, “it was the best of times and it was the worst of times” breaks this rule. But that book was also written a long time ago and that line has some parallelism going for it and it also makes us answer the question: Why. Why was it the best of times AND the worst of them?
So, if you’re going to go with abstract words or flowery sentences, go with something that will make the reader wonder and also hook them in.
Here, check out this excerpt from Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing.”
“You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” he said.
Carver has set us up with concrete words, a want (for the person the eat the hot rolls), but also a hook or a question. What is the time like this? What’s happened?
Or check out the opening of Beloved by Toni Morrison.
124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.
We have a place. We have concrete words and atmosphere (venom, spiteful) and we have people who are potentially at risk (the women and children in the house). And we have a question. Why is 124 spiteful and how?
Each word in Morrison’s beginning needs to be there. It has purpose.
Think of how much stronger it is than:
It was kind of sucky in the place where everyone lived and that was because 124 was so spiteful and had been so to people before.
Or Carver’s ruined would be something like:
The man was convinced that digestion and ingestion would probably cause symptoms of depression or mourning to be alleviated and so he insisted that warm yeasted product enter that human system of mastication and energy transference.
Totally not as fun.
So, when you look to your words, think about them a bit and how you can be more economical, how you can ground the reader in the scene and the moment in concrete ways. It’s pretty fun.