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Choosing the best way to start your story

by | Jan 20, 2020

When you look at the different ways to open a story, you can see which works best.

Choosing the right opening line for your story - Storymakers

Here are a few types of story openers to consider:
An action
Weather
Time
A statement or fact
A question
Dialogue

It’s interesting to see how your choice of opening sentence can direct your entire story. For example, you can see how some sentences entice the reader into what promises to be an interesting and exciting story:

“Pebble dived off the sofa for the 50th time that morning, leaving a pebble-shaped dent on the stone floor.”

This is an action. It asks questions of the reader – who or what is Pebble? How could he/she/it possibly leave a dent in stone? It works much better as an opening than:

“The rain had been falling down heavily for the last two hours.”

Then you have sentences of action that work well on their own, such as:

“Dad lifted up the garden shed and walked with it balanced on his little finger before placing it in the opposite corner of the garden.”

Again, this is an action, where the reader is intrigued from the start about this super-strong dad. However, with a different opening statement sentence, like this one:

“The Bensons lived in an ordinary house, on an ordinary street, in an ordinary town, but the Bensons were no ordinary family, oh no.”

The reader learns something about the whole family, not just one member. Immediately the reader is drawn in, wondering what could be so extraordinary about this family.

What do you think? Have you tried different opening sentences for your story to see what works best and how it might change the direction of the story you want to write?

Do you have a preferred story opening style?

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