5 Wrong Ways to Start A Story

Your story's opener is your one opportunity to capture an editor's or agent's attention. Learn how to avoid the critical mistakes (such as providing too much backstory) that lead to rejection and write a great beginning for your story. Today's tip of the day, taken from Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers At Page One by Les Edgerton, illustrates the five wrong ways to start a story.

Never, ever, ever begin a narrative with action and then reveal the character's merely dreaming it all. Not unless you'd like your manuscript hurled across the room, accompanied by a series of curses. Followed by the insertion of a form rejection letter into your SASE and delivered by the minions of our illustrious postal service. Even though we're dealing with beginnings here, it bears mentioning that you should never--and I never never--end a story by revealing that all that has gone on before was just a dream. Not unless you enjoy the prospect of strangers hunting you down and doing you bodily harm should such a story somehow find print.

Don't open with your protagonist waking to an alarm clock ringing, or to someone shaking her awake, or to a cute little birdie chirping from her bedroom window, or to a blazing sun shining through the window.

This is always a groaner for the agent or editor--a beginning in which she's introduced to the character waking up to an alarm clock ringing or to a clock radio announcing something important, such as the Martians have landed. Such an opening signals clearly to the agent or editor that the writer is about to take her through a tedious and thoroughly dull journey of the character waking, eating breakfast, greeting all the numbingly boring children in the house, and so on. It's going to be hours before she gets the actual story. Hours she's probably not going to invest.

The only thing worse than a story opening with a ringing alarm clock is when the character reaches over to turn it off and then exclaims, "I'm late!" I actually saw a movie in which that happened--wish I could remember the title so I could give it its deserved props. An intelligent reader will root for a cruel and unusual death for someone so irredeemably stupid as to set her alarm clock so she'll be late and is then surprised when it goes off at the time she set it for may actually meet a person of the opposite sex who is equally brain damaged, and the scary thing is that they may have offspring. Resulting in progeny from the shallow end of the gene pool. Now, that's a terrifying thought!

Don't write sentences like: "Was she going to come in or stay out on the porch, he thought to himself." It's been fairly well verified down through the annals of history that when a human being thinks, he almost always does so to himself, and scarcely ever to another person, unless mind-reading is part of the story. When an editor encounters one of these kinds of sentences, your work is probably going to make her laugh, but that's not considered a positive reaction in this case.

One of the primary red flags for many editors and agents is the absence of dialogue on the first few pages of a manuscript. All editors--no matter what the material, screenplay or novel or short story--look for lots and lots of nice white space. Some editors are even known to rifle the pages to see how dense the prose is. (Readers who cover screenplays do this automatically to check for the amount of dialogue in the script--there had better be a lot!) When fiction editors do this and see copy that isn't broken up much, it tells them one thing--that what they're about to encounter is likely to be narrative, narrative, and yet more narrative.

Signaling a read that promises to be boring.

And you know what that means.

Don't quit your day job just yet.

This kind of opening was popular at the turn of the last century; it looks musty now. The problem with beginning a story with dialogue is that the reader knows absolutely nothing about the first character to appear in a story. For that matter, any of the characters. That means that when she encounters a line or lines of dialogue, she doesn't have a clue who the speaker is, who she is speaking to, and in what context. That requires that she read on a bit further to make sense of the dialogue. Then, at least briefly, she has to kind of backtrack in her mind to put it all into context. That represents, at the least, a speed bump, and at worst, a complete stall.

You don't want that! Your goal should be to write narratives with enough skill that the reader never has to pause to figure out what's going on. That interrupts the fictive dream the reader has willingly entered. Once the read is stalled, however momentarily, it becomes easy to put the story down. Many times, never to return. You want to avoid such stalls at all costs.

There are, of course, certain notable exceptions. A line like: "'I'd like to make love to Nancy,' Tom said to his pal Joey, 'but I'd have to look at her face to do it and I don't think I can do that.'" A dialogue opening like that may sometimes work. The thing is, if I began with a snatch of dialogue, I'd make certain that the meaning and context of the lines spoken were clear from the git-go.

Also, remember that a character's thoughts are a form of dialogue--they're an interior monologue. Just another reason to not open with the character ruminating.

Most times, if not always, look for a better way to begin your story than with dialogue.

This excerpt is from Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers At Page One by Les Edgerton. To learn more about the book, read an excerpt on writing opening scenes. For more resources on fiction writing, we suggest: