What Are Cliche Story Openings to Avoid?
Quick answer: The story openings editors see most: waking up, weather, mirrors, dreams and dictionary definitions. Why each one fails and what to write instead.
The openings editors and judges see most often, and tire of fastest, are: a character waking up to an alarm, a weather report with no one in it, a character studying themselves in a mirror, an undisclosed dream, a dictionary definition, a car journey to the story, and a white void of dialogue between unnamed voices. Each is a cliche not because it appeared once too often but because it postpones the actual story while appearing to begin it.
Knowing the list matters for a blunt commercial reason: screeners read openings in stacks. When a first page matches a pattern they have seen four hundred times, attention drops before quality can register. You are not writing for a blank mind; you are writing for a mind with your opening's statistics already in it.
The list, and why each one fails
The wake-up: alarm, stretch, shower, breakfast. It fails because it starts the day instead of the story, and its beats are identical in every manuscript, which is the definition of interchangeable. The mirror scene fails for a related reason: it exists so the narrator can inventory their own hair and eyes, a description no one performs in real life, purely for the writer's convenience.
The weather opening, ridiculed since Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 'It was a dark and stormy night', fails when climate stands in for content: atmosphere with nobody to matter to. The undisclosed dream fails by revoking the reader's investment at the wake-up. The dictionary definition ('Webster's defines courage as...') fails by lecturing before entertaining, and the travel-to-the-story opening, a character driving, flying or walking toward where events will occur, is literal postponement: even the writer agrees the story is somewhere else.
The unifying fault is delay plus familiarity. Each pattern buys the writer time to warm up while giving the reader nothing particular. None of them is fatal in craft terms; all of them are expensive in attention terms, and openings are the one place you cannot afford expense.
The exceptions that prove the mechanics
Every cliche on the list has been redeemed by someone who understood its engine. Kafka opens The Metamorphosis with a wake-up, the single most famous in fiction, because the waking is the catastrophe: Gregor's ordinary morning routine colliding with his new body is the story. The pattern fails when waking is filler; it triumphs when waking is the event.
Dickens opens Bleak House with weather, pages of fog, and it stands among the great openings because the fog is not backdrop but indictment: it flows into the Court of Chancery and becomes the novel's verdict on English law. Orwell opens Nineteen Eighty-Four with weather plus one wrong clock. The lesson repeats: the cliche is the unloaded version; load it and it fires.
Even the mirror can work when what the character sees is wrong, a bruise they do not remember, a face beginning to resemble a hated parent, because then the mirror shows story, not paperwork. The test for any redeemed cliche: does the familiar frame contain an unfamiliar charge the story genuinely needs? If yes, the pattern is camouflage for a hook. If no, it is camouflage for a delay.
What to write instead
Replace the wake-up with the first pressured decision of the day: not the alarm but the phone call ignored, the email drafted and deleted. Replace the mirror with reflection in action: we learn a character's vanity from how they angle toward a shop window, their age from what the barman calls them. Character description delivered through friction always beats inventory.
Replace the weather report with weather that costs somebody something: rain is dull until it soaks the letter, delays the ambulance, ruins the shoes worn to impress. Replace the drive to the story with arrival: begin at the door, the desk, the graveside. And replace the definition or philosophical throat-clearing with a specific person embodying the theme; readers extract ideas from bodies far better than from prefaces.
When you inherit a cliche from your own first draft, and you will, treat it as a bookmark reading 'the real opening is near here'. Drafting into a cliche is normal; submitting one is the error. Blind-judged contests make this brutally visible, since a scorer with fifty entries meets the same five openings all evening, and the entry that skips them starts ahead before its second paragraph.
Misconceptions about opening cliches
'Avoid the list and you are original' misses the point. The list is symptoms; the disease is beginning before the story does. A technically fresh opening that still delays pressure fails the same way, just less detectably. Aim at the disease: instability, specificity and a person to care about, on page one.
'Great authors broke these rules, so the rules are fake' confuses breaking with loading. Kafka, Dickens and du Maurier used the forbidden frames with their engines installed: waking as catastrophe, fog as judgement, dream as disclosed haunting. Imitating their frames without their engines reproduces the cliche, not the greatness.
And 'readers do not notice patterns' underestimates everyone. Ordinary readers may not name the trope, but they feel the drop in particularity as a cooling of interest they cannot explain. Screeners just feel it faster and with a slush pile's worth of evidence. Either way, the coolness arrives before your good scene on page three does.
What poets can take from this
- If your story opens with waking, weather, mirrors, dreams or a journey, find what page one is postponing and start there.
- Load any familiar frame with a wrongness it exists to deliver, or abandon the frame.
- Introduce your protagonist through a pressured choice, not a routine.
- Reveal appearance through other characters' reactions and the world's friction.
- Read your opening against five published stories you admire; if yours could swap into any of them, it is not yours yet.
Try it yourself
Deliberately write the worst opening you can using all five cliches in one paragraph: alarm, weather, mirror, dream and a drive. Then write the paragraph the cliches were hiding: same character, same day, starting at the first moment of real pressure. Submit only the second.
Questions
Is it ever acceptable to open with a character waking up?
Yes, when the waking itself is the story's disturbance, an unfamiliar room, a changed body, a missing person beside them. The cliche is waking as routine; waking as catastrophe or clue is simply an opening in medias res.
Why is 'It was a dark and stormy night' considered bad?
Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 sentence became shorthand for overwrought, unanchored openings: weather described at length before anyone exists to be rained on, in prose that keeps interrupting itself. Weather that immediately costs a character something escapes the objection entirely.
Do opening cliches matter outside slush piles and contests?
Yes, because browsing readers run the same triage with less patience: sample pages, first paragraphs, look-inside previews. Any context where strangers audition your opening rewards particularity and punishes the familiar delay.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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