How do you start a story? By KM Rockwood

Do you follow modern conventional wisdom to begin “in media res” (Latin for “in the middle of things”) or do you go for a soft beginning which sets the stage?

Most of us manage to avoid the worst cliché openings, like having our protagonist examine themself in a mirror to describe the finely chiseled features, brooding eyes, etc.

Then there’s the “in the car on the way to the scene” tactic, where two characters lay out the background the author wants us to know before we get into the action.

Even an apparent action beginning can be stale. How many times can we open with a crime scene, emergency vehicles swarming, lights flashing, while our protagonist talks on the phone about the unidentified young woman whose mutilated body is the subject of all the attention?

I’ve been rereading some of my favorite classics, and I’ve been struck by the variations in beginnings.

In Dick Francis’s Nerve, he starts out with: “Art Mathews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the center of the parade ring at Dunstable races.” That’s in media res.

Many of the classics from the most respected authors, however, go to great pains to establish background, setting and characters for their stories. I’m well into chapter three of Patricia Wentworth’s Touch and Go, having a pleasant time but not encountering anything that might be labeled a “hook” in today’s parlance.

Agatha Christie addressed this very dilemma of how to start a story in Murder on the Links, when she opens the novel with: “I believe that a well-known anecdote exists that a young writer, determined to make the commencement of his story forcible and original enough to catch and rivet the attention of the most blasé of editors, penned the following sentence: ‘Hell,’ said the Dutchess.”

She goes on to give us information and background, with some conversation that might be considered intriguing, but nothing approaching action for the rest of the chapter.

Ngaio Marsh and Margaret Yorke used prologues effectively. Some authors today also use that technique, but in many quarters, it’s frowned upon, and new authors use it at their own peril.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson begins this first Sherlock Holmes tale with a rambling account of his own history and how he met Holmes. The story itself is not broached until well into the book.

I have to confess that some of my favorites, Ellis Peter’s Cadfael series, often begin with a lengthy historical-information dump that I find mind-numbing. I skim over the beginnings until I get past that.

Some successful modern authors argue for the soft beginning, using it effectively to set up contrasts (a bright sunny day when evil lurks incongruously) or to spin an ever-tightening web around a character. They feel that most readers will enjoy the suspense and anticipation as the story builds.

That’s probably true for authors whose readers are so familiar with that author’s work that they are confidently looking forward to a satisfying story.

For many of the rest of us, maybe not so much.

My own tendency is to make an attempt to provide enough background so that the reader can make sense of the story. However, I have learned that although that is how my first draft starts, I need to cut to the actual story (page three, perhaps?) immediately. The original start does give me information to be woven in, as unobtrusively as I can manage.

Different authors use different beginning techniques. There’s no “right way” to start a story. If it works for that author and the readers, it was a successful beginning.

I’m sure most of us try to avoid the purple prose of the “It was a dark and stormy night…” opening which Edward Bulwer-Lytton started his 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

The novel itself was quite a success.

That beginning is so classic it inspires Snoopy, sitting with his typewriter on top of his doghouse, to begin his novel with it. And the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was started in 1982 at San Jose State University. It challenges entrants to compose “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”

The entire first sentence of Paul Clifford reads: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

And, just to illustrate the truism that the exception proves the rule, Madeleine L’Engle deliberately begins her famous A Wrinkle in Time” with, “It was a dark and stormy night.”