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How do you start a short story?
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Sep 2, 2021 · A short story can have a myriad of beginnings, and it all comes down to which suits the content, genre, and tone of the entire story you’re trying to tell. A good beginning will hook the reader’s attention from the opening lines, and keep them engaged for the rest of the story.
May 7, 2024 · Whether you’re struggling with how to write a short story outline, or how to fully develop a character in so few words, this guide is your starting point. Famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie have used the short story form to play with ideas before turning those stories into novels.
- The Telling Detail
- The Paradox
- The Historical Backdrop
- The Anecdotal Approach
- In Media Res
- The Refrain
- Setting The Rules
- Beginning with The Inciting Incident
- The Thought Experiment
- The Conundrum
“One Dollar And Eighty-seven Cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheek burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. ...
“In the beginning, Sanford Carter was ashamed of becoming an Army cook. This was not from snobbery, at least not from snobbery of the most direct sort. During the two and a half years Carter had been in the Army he had come to hate cooks more and more. They existed for him as a symbol of all that was corrupt, overbearing, stupid, and privileged in ...
A protege of Flaubert and the author of the novel Bel-Ami, Maupassant wrote over 300 short stories, many of them – like this one – set during the Franco-Prussian war, and showing how innocent lives are swept up and crushed by futile, brutal conflict. This story starts with a brief paragraph of context and another telling detail: the absence of spar...
‘Cat Person,’ reportedly the first short story ever to go viral, tells a simple tale of a doomed romantic encounter. Margot, a student, meets an older guy, Robert, and they begin a flirtation that turns into a date that turns into a rather unsatisfactory (for her) sexual encounter. Robert starts off as rather funny and charming, but over time we se...
Literally ‘in the middle of things’, an in media res beginning is where the story drops us into the middle of the action of the narrative, so that we are instantly caught up in events. In this case, we are plunged into the excited bustle of a well-to-do family preparing a sumptuous garden party, and the story does a fantastic job of building up the...
Cathy Ulrich’s extraordinary ‘Murdered Ladies’flash fictions present a series of stories – there are 40 of them in her collection, Ghosts of You – which always begin with the same line: The thing about being the murdered extra/girlfriend/moll/classmate/witch/dancer [etc] is you set the plot in motion. It’s a thought-provoking line, which grows in p...
In any story that seeks to build a world that is not ours, there is some work to be done in establishing the reality of that world – its customs, its landscape, its people, its rules. World-building stories can sometimes fall down when they indulge in too much of an expository info dump, as the accumulation of background detail can quickly dent nar...
Screenwriting guru Robert Mckee describes the inciting incident as a moment that ‘radically upsets the balance of forces in your protagonist’s life’. It’s the moment when our main character is plunged out of their normal routine and a challenge or quest appears which will shape their journey, and with it the rest of the story. It’s common to locate...
Aimee Bender’s story begins by asking the reader to imagine something extraordinarily counterfactual: that her lover is regressing through millennia, going through the evolutionary process so fast – a million years a day, in reverse – that we can actually track his progress by the day. One day he is a baboon, another a salamander; eventually he is ...
This subtle and absorbing story from Zadie Smith opens with a mystery: an embassy, set in a leafy north London suburb rather than a grand central district of the city, and a wall, behind which a mysterious game of badminton is being played. The rest of the story picks at this mystery and uses the imagined score in the ongoing game-playing as a back...
Mar 6, 2024 · There are a variety of great ways to begin your short story, and the best beginning depends on what you’re trying to achieve. For example, start with a scene that’s important or engaging to hook your reading right away. Alternatively, establish the setting of your story first if it’s key to your plot and helps set the right mood.
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- Create a Hook. A great way to start a story is to draw the reader in with a hook – something that will create intrigue. ‘I’ve often wondered what happened to Steve – did he find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?’
- Start with Dialogue. You might have seen advice about never starting a novel with a dialogue opening. But in certain cases it works, such as when you want to introduce a character quickly without a lot of explanation.
- Ask a Question. Questions are a great way to open a novel, especially when the answer (and the story that follows) could go in many different directions.
- Write Something Unexpected. ‘I never knew the impact of the purple pen until it exploded in my face.’ Starting your novel with an unexpected statement takes your reader off guard and makes them wonder how your character got to this point.
May 9, 2023 · How To Start a Short Story [8 EXAMPLES & STRATEGIES] – Hannah Lee Kidder. The power of a captivating opener can’t be underestimated when it comes to writing effective short stories. A story beginning should grab attention, intrigue, surprise, shock, or spark an emotional reaction in your reader. This will lead them to finishing the story.
10 Compelling Ways to Start a Story. You’ve got to command reader attention and answer some important questions, but what does that look like on the page? How do you structure your opening to accomplish those objectives? Have you heard of modeling? Life coaches and success gurus talk about it a lot.
