Beginnings: How to Start a Story

Curse the blank page and its haunting, blinking cursor. The ideas are there, why can’t they just appear on the page? I’ve been there. We’ve all been there. Here are a few ways I get myself started. 

This time, I’m not talking about getting into the mood to write, like I did in the “Write Something!” post from March (though those are also handy ways to help get your creative juices flowing). Instead, I’m talking about the actual beginning of a story. The exposition, the inciting incident, all the way to the rising action to get to that big climax you probably started with. Now, I used some terms there that not everyone may be familiar with, so I’ll break it down:

Exposition

This is THE beginning. It is the introduction to the main character, their world, and the mood of the story. With the first chapter (or two), your audience will need to be grounded enough so that they have the right questions that keep them reading more instead of DNFing (leaving a book you started reading behind to never be finished). 

Like in journalism, we as authors want to quickly establish the five W’s: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

The main character should be named and described both outwardly and inwardly. The audience should have a decent sense of their core values/beliefs/traits. Authors are accused of inserting themselves into the main character, but that’s because of the “write what you know” advice that is tried and true. Our most compelling writing comes from drawing on our own experiences, so when your character shares an aspect of yourself, you’ll be able to make her sound very real because what you are writing reflects a true, human experience that others can latch onto.

The setting should be concrete. Even in a fantasy world or world other than the one we live in, the audience will want to see it in order to get that grounding they need. We should get clues to how the world works around what type of setting it is (city, countryside, ocean, a lava planet, etc.). What lights spaces, fluorescent tubes or candlesticks? How do people contact each other, through text, handwritten letters, voice recording birds, or holograms? What types of jobs do people have? 

Now, this isn’t as serious when writing something that takes place in our world in today’s age, but understanding these aspects of your story will not only help your audience fall into your story, but it will also give you confidence to write it!  

Inciting Incident

I like to think of this as the second beginning, or the true beginning. This is Harry receiving his letter to Hogwarts, Primrose being selected for the Games, Tris discovering she’s divergent, Percy’s teacher turning into a fury and attacking him, etc. A huge curveball is thrown at the main character and they are faced with what is essentially an existential crisis where they will have to figure out how to fit into this new reality. Harry eagerly jumps into the Wizarding world, Katniss volunteers in her sister’s place, Tris chooses Dauntless, and Percy stops rejecting the mythical. 

Now, it doesn’t always have to be as clear-cut as that, but it is typically an event (or scene) that propels the story into action. It is the how or why concerning the main character winding up on the path to the climax. 

Rising Action

These are the events that lead to the climax. Think of them like checkpoints in a video game. In Hades, Zagreus has to get through Tarturus, defeat the furies, get through Asphodel, defeat the hydra, get through Elysium, defeat Theseus and Asterius, get through the Temple of Styx to get past Cerberus, and then he reaches the final boss battle with Hades (the climax). This is all the middle stuff, so I’ll build on that in another blog post.

Climax

This is the part of the story I struggle to write the most. I’m not good at confrontation that ends in resolve. I like to build and build and build; but all that building has to lead somewhere, and that’s the climax. As with the rising action, I’ll build more on this in the future *wink wink*.

Here’s What I Do

I have a day-in-the-life approach to starting a new story, or something that otherwise establishes the norm. In the Touched Apothecary series I’m working on, book one (“Mythic”) begins with an average day for Octavia, the main character, with just one thing out of place (a missing ingredient) to justify discussing various relationships. She engages with her farmhand who also happens to be her best friend, delivers product to someone in town, runs into others there, and essentially goes about business as usual until the inciting incident of Carlisle failing to return from his last-minute journey into the Dire Woods. 

Conducting her morning routine, venturing into town, and both visiting and being visited by others are ways to establish relationships while getting the audience used to the world and understanding why the inciting incident is so inciting. If the audience doesn’t meet the farmhand first, they won’t care that he’s missing or even grasp why the main character does. If we didn’t know what the Games were, we wouldn’t fully grasp the levity of Katniss volunteering to participate. 

In “Call of the Void,” the first chapter describes Marley’s first attempt to end her life. This is her norm. We get inside her head and understand that for the entirety of the story, Marley is going to be fixated on ending her life. The true inciting incident is not when she hears something that makes her lose focus, but when she meets this figure later when another attempt nearly succeeds and she is actually thrust back to life at the figure’s command. 

So beginnings don’t have to be boring, but they do have to establish some sort of regular so that when the irregular interrupts the main character’s day-to-day, the audience can fully grasp the impact. 

Start anywhere! A lot of the time, we think too much about starting in the perfect spot and being just right about every little detail. We get in our heads, which means we get in our own way. Remember above all else that nobody publishes their first draft. I rewrote the beginning of “Mythic” multiple times before even finishing the first draft because I realized what needed to be said/done in the very beginning as I wrote out the middle and ending. This is extremely common, not just for pantsers (writers who write without outlining), but for all writers. Sometimes things just click later in the process, and that’s okay! But you can’t figure out how to make your beginning shine if you never start writing in the first place. 

Above all else, allow yourself to be messy. You can clean it up later. No one has to know.