In the Beginning of Your Story

Establish your setting early on. Give The When, The Where, The Weather — the overall tone — as John Steinbeck does so well in the beautiful opening of Of Mice and Men:

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees — willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ‘coons, and with the spreadpads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

In the beginning, let us also see your main characters — or, at the very least, let us glimpse them, or hear about them in an intriguing way. For example:

“But at the last moment, she left him for a man no one knew, a dark-horse from nobody knew where, a man of great strength and strange habits…”

Or:

“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt.”

In the beginning, show your characters in the face of some adversity. (“Plots stem from characters under adversity,” wrote Crawford Kilian.) Show us your characters struggling.

The greater the struggle, the better the plot.

Differentiate early on for us the protagonist from the antagonist. Let us know in whom we’re to be emotionally invested. Which character is good? Which bad?

For example:

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

In the beginning, give us a hint of your story’s Situation. Show us something of the nature of the struggle that is to come. Let us glimpse what’s at stake — as Nabokov does in the following excerpt, which is from the beginning of his book Laughter in the Dark:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling.

Finally, if your protagonist bleeds badly in the last chapter, have him cut himself in the beginning of your story. This is called foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is effective and poetic.

But don’t feel as if you need to cram all this into your beginning. Think of it as a way to structure and organize your beginning, so that it flows and gives you a method by which you tell your story.

Top Thirteen Best First Sentences In Literature

“Don’t judge a book by its cover; judge it by its opening.”

Said Douglas Bunting.

Actually, the first sentence doesn’t mean everything, and at least half the books listed below don’t particularly satisfy me. And yet there’s no denying it: a good opening contains all the promise of a new dawn. What follows is my top-thirteen list of the best first sentences in literature:

13. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. (H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu)

12. Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began. (David Fisher, The War Magician)

11. A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green. (John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men)

10. A screaming comes across the sky. (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow)

9. He was born in an air-raid shelter — and his first wail was drowned by the shriek of bombs, the thunder of falling walls and the coughing chatter of machine guns raking the sky. (L Ron Hubbard, Final Blackout)

8. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. (Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche)

7. A voice comes to one in the dark. (Samuel Beckett, Company)

6. See the child. (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)

5. On an exceptionally hot evening in early July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment).

4. In lower Manhattan, there is an improbable point where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place. (Nicolas Christopher, Veronica)

3. There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo to the hills. (Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country).

2. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. (George Eliot, Middlemarch).

1. If it made any real sense — and it doesn’t even begin to — I think I might be inclined to dedicate this account, for whatever it’s worth, especially if it’s the least bit ribald in parts, to the memory of my late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr. (J.D. Salinger, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period)


I showed you mine. Now tell me yours.

How To Begin Your Story

Establish your setting early on. Give us The When, The Where, The Weather — the overall tone. Is your story happy, soft, somber?

John Steinbeck does this so well in the beautiful opening of Of Mice and Men:

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees — willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ‘coons, and with the spreadpads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

In the beginning, let us also see your main characters — or, at the very least, let us glimpse them, or hear about them in an intriguing way. For example:

“But at the last moment, she left him for a man no one knew, a dark-horse from nobody knew where, a man of great strength and strange habits…”

Or:

“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt.”

In the beginning, show us your characters in the face of some adversity. (“Plots stem from characters under adversity,” wrote Crawford Kilian.) Show us your characters struggling.

Remember always: the greater the struggle, the better the plot.

Early on, differentiate for us the protagonist from the antagonist. Let us know in whom we’re to be emotionally invested. Which character is good? Which bad? For example:

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Your hero — even if she’s an antihero — must be someone with whom we can identify, at least on some level. There must be good qualities in your protagonist, or qualities with which we can relate.

Conversely, your antagonist, who can indeed be remarkable and even admirable, must in some way be pitted against your protagonist. (A la Javert.)

In the beginning, give us a hint of your story’s Situation. Show us something of the nature of the struggle that is to come. Let us glimpse what’s at stake — as Nabokov does in the following excerpt, which is from the beginning of his book Laughter in the Dark:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling.

Finally, if your protagonist bleeds badly in the last chapter, have him cut himself in the beginning of your story. This is called foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is effective and poetic.

Lastly, don’t feel as if you need to cram all this into your beginning. Think of it as a way to structure your beginning, so that it flows and gives you a method by which you tell your story.