How to start a story: four openings that work
Four practical ways to open a story, what to cut from a first page, and the openings of seven classics taken apart, with a first-page checklist to download.
The short answer
- Start on the day something is different, as close to the trouble as the reader can follow.
- Put one person on the page early, doing something, in a place you can see.
- Choose how you open: in a scene, with a voice, with a question, or with a change.
- Make the first line carry information: who, where, or what is wrong.
- Cut the waking up, the weather report and the backstory that explains everything.
- End the first page with a question the reader wants answered.
- Write the opening fast, then rewrite it last, when you know what the story is.
What a first page has to do
A reader gives a new story a page or two. In that space the opening has to do four things. It doesn't need to explain the world, introduce the cast or reach the inciting incident. It needs to make the next page feel necessary.
- Someone
- A person to follow, even before we know their name: a voice, a pair of eyes, a body in a room.
- Somewhere
- Enough of a place and a time that the reader isn't floating. One concrete detail does more than a paragraph of scenery.
- Something off
- A want, a problem, a contradiction or a change. Calm is fine; nothing at stake is not.
- A tone
- The opening tells the reader what kind of story this is: comic, cold, frightening, tender. Keep that promise.
There are many ways to do that. Most strong openings lean on one of four, below, each shown on books old enough to be in the public domain.
1. Open in a scene
Begin in a moment with a time, a place and people in it, as if the camera were already running. Scene openings are the safest choice for a first story because they force you to show a character doing something instead of describing them.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
The first line of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) gives us a speaker, a season, a complaint and a posture. Within four lines all four March sisters have spoken, and each line tells you who she is. By the fifth we know their father is away at the war, and nobody has stopped to explain it.
Opening on dialogue works when the line reveals character and situation together, as Jo's does. It fails when two unnamed voices trade lines in a white room. Anchor a dialogue opening with a name and one physical action within a sentence or two.
2. Open with a voice
Some stories start by letting the narrator talk. The reader keeps going because the voice is good company, or strange, or funny, and because how someone talks tells us who they are before anything happens.
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) sets up a narrator in one sentence: a boy, uneducated, direct, and already arguing with the book he came from. Jane Austen does the opposite with the same tool. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" sounds like a law, and the irony tells you the narrator doesn't believe a word of it.
A voice opening only works if the voice holds for the whole book. If you can't keep it up for three chapters, it isn't the story's voice yet; open in a scene and let the voice grow.
3. Open with a question
A question opening states something that is clear and complete in itself, and that makes the reader ask "why?" or "what happened?" It isn't a literal question. It's a fact with a door left open.
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Charles Dickens opens A Christmas Carol (1843) by insisting on a death. "To begin with" promises that more is coming, and anyone who knows it is a ghost story knows Marley won't stay put. Arthur Conan Doyle does it in nine words at the start of "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891): "To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman." Who is she, and how did she earn the word?
The rule for question openings is to answer the question later, but not much later, and to open a bigger one when you do. A mystery the book never pays off reads as a trick.
4. Open with a change
Here the story starts at the moment ordinary life breaks. The first page shows the normal state and the crack in it together, so the reader feels the change instead of being told about it.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do.
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) gives us a whole paragraph of boredom, and then a White Rabbit with a pocket-watch runs past. The boredom is the normal state, and it lasts exactly as long as it needs to. Franz Kafka goes further in The Metamorphosis (1915): in the first sentence Gregor Samsa wakes up in his own bed transformed into an insect, and the rest of the story is about what his family does next.
Change openings suit plot-driven stories: thrillers, fantasy, mysteries. Keep the normal state short, but don't skip it. A reader who never saw the ordinary world can't feel it break.
Where the story starts
Most first drafts start too early: with the alarm clock, the drive to work, the history of the town. Writers need to write those pages to find the story. Readers don't need to read them. Three tests help you find the real first page:
- The different day
- Why does the story start today and not last week? Begin on the day the answer is true.
- The first choice
- Find the first moment your character decides something. Start a scene or two before it.
- The cut test
- Delete your first page, then your second. If the story still makes sense, it starts later.
Starting late doesn't mean starting with an explosion. Jane Eyre starts with a cancelled walk. What matters is that the trouble is already in the room, as you'll see in the worked example.
What to cut from a first page
These are the things that most often slow a first page down. None is banned; each needs a reason to be there.
- Waking up, getting dressed, looking in a mirror to describe yourself.
- Weather that changes nothing. Weather that stops a walk, sinks a ship or traps a family is fine.
- Backstory in a block. Give the reader the past only when the present needs it, ideally in conflict.
- A dream or a fake-out that the next paragraph takes back.
- A crowd of names. One or two people on page one; the rest can wait.
- Feelings named instead of shown: "she was nervous" next to hands that aren't doing anything.
- A prologue that exists to explain the world, when chapter one could show it.
Here is a draft opening of the kind most of us write first, and the same material after the cut.
Before · 94 words
My name is Nell Harrow and I am thirty-four years old. I grew up in a small fishing town on the north coast, where my father ran the harbour office until he died three years ago. We had always been close, although we argued about many things, especially my move to the city. Now I had come back to sort out his things. It was a grey morning in March. I woke up early, made a cup of coffee and looked out of the window at the sea, thinking about everything that had happened.
After · 58 words
The harbour office still had his name on the door, and someone had paid to have it repainted. Nell stood on the step with the key he had posted her inside a birthday card, the year she stopped coming home for birthdays. She didn't need it. The lock had been forced, and the door was open an inch.
Her age, the town's history and the morning routine are gone. The father, the rift and the return are still there, packed into an object (the key in a birthday card) instead of a summary. And the last line opens a question the first draft never asked: who got here first?
Worked example: the first chapter of Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847. Its first chapter is 1,934 words by our count, and it does everything this guide describes without ever stopping to explain. Here it is, move by move.
| Where | What happens | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| First line | "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." | A normal day already broken, and someone kept indoors. |
| Paragraph two | Jane is glad: she hates walks, and feels small beside Eliza, John and Georgiana Reed. | Voice: honest, a little contrary, and ranking herself below the others. |
| Paragraph three | Mrs. Reed keeps her apart from the "contented, happy, little children" by the fire. | The situation: she is inside the house and outside the family. |
| Her first words | "What does Bessie say I have done?" She is told to be silent. | She pushes back. The first conflict is one line long. |
| Behind the curtain | She hides in the window seat with Bewick's book of birds. | A want: to be left alone in a world of her own. |
| About 900 words in | "Boh! Madam Mope!" John Reed finds her. | The opposition arrives, and takes the book. |
| The end of the chapter | He throws the book, she fights back, and she is locked in the red-room. | The change: the first time she answers back, and its price. |
Notice where the backstory goes. We learn that Jane is an orphan with no money from John Reed, as an insult: "you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money." The past arrives as conflict in the present, which is why the chapter never stalls. If your first page has a paragraph of history, look for the person who could throw it at your character instead.
Free first-page checklist
Twelve checks for the first page, the four openings to try your first line in, and a cut list. Copy it into whatever you write in, or download it as a Markdown file that opens in Word, Google Docs or Feldar.
BEFORE YOU WRITE
Whose story is it:
Why does it start today:
What do they want in this scene:
THE FIRST PAGE
[ ] One person to follow by the end of paragraph one
[ ] A place and a time the reader can see
[ ] A question the reader wants answered at the bottom
Starting a story in Feldar
In Feldar you write your opening yourself, in your own words. If you know where the scene goes but not the next sentence, Continue from here offers a continuation in blue, and it stays only if you accept it. When the first chapter is down, Outline keeps the scenes of the next one beside the page, so the opening's promises have somewhere to go. Feldar's AI for novelists works this way throughout: it suggests, and you decide.
Sources
All checked November 8, 2026. Quotations are from these texts.
- Jane Eyre
- Project Gutenberg eBook #1260; chapter one counted with the rules of our word counter
- Little Women
- Project Gutenberg eBook #514
- Huckleberry Finn
- Project Gutenberg eBook #76
- Pride and Prejudice
- Project Gutenberg eBook #1342
- A Christmas Carol
- Project Gutenberg eBook #46
- A Scandal in Bohemia
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Project Gutenberg eBook #1661
- Alice in Wonderland
- Project Gutenberg eBook #11
- The Metamorphosis
- Project Gutenberg eBook #5200; described, not quoted
Questions
How do you start a story?
Start on the day something is different, with one person doing something in a place the reader can see. Open in a scene, with a voice, with a question or with a change, and end the first page on a question the reader wants answered.
What makes a good first sentence?
One that carries information and leaves something open: who is talking, where we are, or what is wrong. "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" does all three in ten words. Don't spend days on it in the first draft; first lines are usually rewritten last.
Is it OK to start a story with dialogue?
Yes, if the line shows character and situation together and you anchor it quickly with a name and an action, as Little Women does. Two unnamed voices talking in an empty room is the version that fails.
Should I start with a prologue?
Only if it shows a scene the reader needs and can't get later, such as an event years before the main story. A prologue that explains the world or the history is usually backstory in a block; try cutting it and see whether chapter one still works.
Can a story open with the weather?
It can when the weather changes something. In Jane Eyre the rain cancels a walk and traps Jane in the house with the Reeds, which starts the plot. Weather that is only scenery is one of the first things to cut.
Should I write the opening first or last?
Write a rough opening first so you can get going, then rewrite it when the draft is done. Only then do you know what the story promises, and the first page has to make those promises.
What is the difference between starting a story and starting a book?
Starting a story is about the opening on the page. Starting a book is about the whole project: choosing the idea, a plan, the first chapter and a writing habit. Our guide on how to start a book covers that side.