How Do You Start a Story?
Quick answer: How do you start a story? Open close to the moment things change, with a specific character in a specific trouble. Practical methods, examples and fixes.
Start a story as close as you can to the moment things change, with a specific person in a specific situation that is already tilting. Give the reader three anchors fast, who we are with, where we are, what is unstable, and withhold everything else. You do not need the character's history, the town's geography or the weather. You need a reason to read sentence two, and instability is that reason.
The practical comfort hiding in this advice: you do not have to start at the beginning. Most working writers discover the true opening during revision and delete their original first page. Begin anywhere that has heat, write the story, then ask where the reader should actually come in. Openings are decisions, not doorways you must find on day one.
The longer answer: enter late, anchor fast
The oldest professional rule is enter late, leave early: begin inside the situation rather than ahead of it. Not the morning of the wedding, but the vow interrupted; not the drive to the interview, but the lie already told in it. Readers orient faster than beginners fear, and confusion of the right kind, curiosity about what is going on, is fuel. Confusion about who is speaking or where we are is friction; the skill is telling those apart.
Anchor with the concrete. A name, a want and one physical detail beat a page of scene-setting: 'Marta counted the till twice before she let herself look at the door' plants person, tension and place in one line. Abstract openings, musings on time, memory or life, ask the reader to care about ideas before they have anyone to care through.
There are honest exceptions. Slow openings can work when voice itself is the hook, when the narrator's way of speaking is so alive that nothing needs to happen yet. Dickens opens Bleak House with fog and no protagonist, and it grips because the prose performs. If you claim this exception, know the price: the voice must do the pulling that events are not doing.
Openings that work, and why
Franz Kafka begins The Metamorphosis (1915) with the change already complete: Gregor Samsa wakes as a monstrous insect in the first sentence. No lead-up, no explanation ever. The lesson is nerve: the story starts where the trouble is, and the reader's disbelief is simply outrun.
Jane Austen opens Pride and Prejudice (1813) with a joke: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' One sentence establishes theme, irony and the entire social machinery of the plot. The lesson: an opening can promise a mind, not just an event, and readers will follow a mind anywhere.
Shirley Jackson starts The Lottery in sunshine, flowers and small talk, an aggressively ordinary village morning. The instability is invisible but present in every line once you know. The lesson: quiet openings work when something underneath is wrong, and the reader can smell it before they can name it.
A working method for tonight
Write the scene where things change, first, before any setup. Most writers produce warm-up pages because they are explaining the situation to themselves; that is fine, as long as you treat those pages as scaffolding. When the draft exists, find your first genuinely unstable moment and try beginning there. Nine times out of ten the story improves and nothing vital is lost.
Then build your opening paragraph deliberately: one specific character, one action in progress, one detail of place, one note of wrongness. Test it with the question a slush reader silently asks: why am I being told this now? If the honest answer is background, cut and start later.
Finally, make the opening a promise you intend to keep. A comic first page promises a comic story; a corpse promises a crime story; a lyrical meditation promises interiority. Mismatched promises, not slow pacing, cause many rejections. This is doubly true in judged competitions, where structure is scored on its own line; Writory's short story rubric, like most, rewards openings whose promise the ending visibly pays off.
Where openings go wrong
The alarm-clock start: waking, stretching, showering, breakfast, a character booting up like a computer. It delays the story and tells the reader the writer was warming up. Unless the waking is the story (as it is for Gregor Samsa), start later in the day or later in the plot.
The information dump: two pages of history, genealogy or world rules before anything happens. Readers accept information beautifully once they care and resent it before. Feed backstory in crumbs, on a need-to-know basis, after motion has begun.
The weather report and the mirror: opening on climate description with no one in it, or having the narrator inspect their own reflection so the writer can list features. Both are viewpoint standing still. And the throat-clearing philosophical prologue: if your first paragraph could open a hundred different stories, it opens none of them well.
What poets can take from this
- Begin as near the disturbance as clarity allows, then trim nearer in revision.
- Name your protagonist in the first two sentences; anonymous pronouns burn goodwill.
- Put something in motion before you explain anything at all.
- Cut your current first paragraph as an experiment; if the story survives, keep the cut.
- Make paragraph one promise the story you actually wrote.
- Save the backstory for page three and beyond, delivered in crumbs.
Try it yourself
Take any story idea and write three different openings of 100 words each: one starting mid-argument, one starting the morning after the disaster, one starting with the narrator's voice addressing the reader directly. Pick the one that makes sentence two unavoidable.
Questions
Should a story start with action?
It should start with instability, which is broader than action. A car chase can be inert if we know no one in it, while a held silence at a dinner table can be riveting. Aim for motion plus a person to care through, not spectacle for its own sake.
How much backstory belongs in an opening?
Almost none. Readers need orientation, who, where, what is off, not history. Deliver backstory in small pieces once curiosity exists to pay for it; a single resonant hint in the opening usually outperforms a paragraph of explanation.
Can you start a story with dialogue?
Yes, if the line is doing work and the speaker is anchored within a sentence or two. A strong spoken line creates instant motion; the risk is disembodied voices, so ground the scene quickly with a name and a physical detail.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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