How to Start a Story
Jul 15, 2025
By Moriah Richard
When you sit down in front of the blank page, many writers find themselves stuck. It can be agonizing to find the right place to start a story. After all, you’re living in the world; you know the history, the backstories of your characters, their past, present, and futures. Where do you find the right place to start? Especially when so many agents and other industry professionals really home in on the first chapter or so and judge the work based on that small sample.
Prologues
When you're thinking about how to start a story, you might consider putting in a prologue—cue the eyeroll from many BookTok and Bookstagrammer influencers. Why? Because they’re so used to seeing bad prologues. I believe this is because authors misunderstand the purpose of a prologue. In her article “The Prohibition Against Prologues,” Tiffany Yates Martin explains that “A prologue is not a substitute for initial action or a strong hook, a way to ‘cheat’ in initial backstory or bring the reader up to speed, or an explanation of the story readers need to orient to or make sense of it. Effective prologues serve an essential narrative purpose and should be intentional and intrinsic to the story.” She explains that a good prologue “may establish key characters and/or story events,” “provide essential context or clues about the story that enhance readers’ experience of it,” “offer historical or factual perspective,” or “foreshadow some key aspect of the story.”
Chapter One
But if you’re looking to skip the prologue and dive right into the meat of your story, you want to think about how to start a story with a gripping first chapter.
“As an aspiring author, the prospect of writing Chapter One should not intimidate, but excite the hell out of you,” says Elizabeth Sims in her article “8 Ways to Write a 5-Star First Chapter.” “Why? Because no other part of your book can provide you with the disproportionate payoff that an excellent first chapter can. Far more than a great query letter, a great Chapter One can attract the attention of an agent. It can keep a harried editor from yawning and hitting ‘delete.’ It can make a bookstore browser keep turning pages during the slow walk to the cash registers. And yes, it can even keep a bleary-eyed owner of one of those electronic thingamajigs touching the screen for more, more, more!”
Nancy Kress agrees with Sims about how to start a story in her article “The Very Beginning: The Opening Scene”: “You can deliberately incorporate the qualities that make an opening interesting and original: character, conflict, specificity, and credibility. These are, of course, elements that are present throughout the entire length of successful stories and novels. However, for beginnings they have particular applications and forms.” She explains that a beginning makes promises to the reader, both emotional and intellectual, that you need to consider when building the rest of your plot. Some of those can be explored by the way you start your story.
Inciting Incident
When you how to start a story, you want to make sure you have a full understanding of the inciting incident. “The inciting incident is the moment that the character has the tables flipped on them, their world turns upside down, they are given an impossible decision, or what they love most is ripped away,” says Abigail Owens in her article “Top 4 Tips for Writing Great Beginnings.” “It’s what sets that character on their journey and starts the conflict. Already this is an important moment. But you can punch it up by taking advantage of all the ways it impacts the MC.” She goes on to explore the way the inciting incident can make changes to the future, world, and your character’s sense of self, all which are anchored in that first chapter.
In Medias Res
Another technique for how to start a story is in medias res, which means in the middle of the action. Paul Buchanan shares this in his article “Begin From the Middle”: “There’s one important consideration when choosing where to start a story. Think of the launching point as a dividing line: That moment in the story’s timeline—whenever it occurs in the chronology of events—determines the status of every event you write from that point on. All the things that happened before the tale begins are the backstory. Everything that happens after is, for lack of a better term, the frontstory.
“Here’s a simple rule that will help keep everything clear for the reader: Frontstory is told in chronological order, from the launching point on. But backstory can be told in any order you so choose. This gives the writer wonderful flexibility in how the narrative is assembled. You can use flashbacks or memories or allusions to arrange backstory in any order that works. Backstory can be shuffled like a deck of cards and it will still be clear to the reader—as long as we return to the next event in the frontstory.”
Final Considerations
While there are so many different techniques for how to start a story, I hope this short article gives you some food for thought! Above all, you want to make sure that you’re considering the trajectory of your entire narrative when you choose where you want to begin.
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