Here, I'm using the term "story starters" to mean beginnings, or lead-ins. Stories are dynamic, tight, small packages that yield big, and as first impressions mean
everything, the first lines must suggest that the best is yet to come, or the story fails from the start. Not every author opens in the same way, and there is no formula
for an opening passage. Some authors will jump right into the action. Others will pan in from the outside like a long film shot moving in close from somewhere up in the
sky. Others begin with startling statments or intense dialogue, perhaps even humour.
To Write Better Story Starters Yourself, Analyze Those Written by Others
This page lists first lines by many published authors and will provide numerous ideas for your own story starters. Analyze how each sentence works—How dense is the
sentence? How much information does it hold? How much description? How much do readers learn in that single sentence? What questions does each sentence raise? Which ones most
pique your interest, and why? What have you learned about story starters?
Short Stories: Story Starters
The pair moved through that gray landscape as though no one would see them—dressed alike in overalls and faded coats, one big, one little, one black-headed, one
tow-headed, father and son. ~ Eudora Welty, LADIES IN SPRING
To put us at our ease, to quiet our hearts as she lay dying, our dear friend Selena said, Life, after all, has not been an unrelieved horror—you know, I did
have many wonderful years with her. ~ Grace Paley, FRIENDS
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was President-elect there must have been sculptors all over America who wanted a chance to model his head from life, but my mother had
connections. ~ Richard Yates, OH, JOSEPH, I'M SO TIRED
Frank saw her more than a block away, in the town where he had come to live, where Maggie had no business to be, and he no expectation of seeing her. ~ John Updike, NATURAL COLOR
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had
kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. ~ Annie Proulx, THE HALF-SKINNED DEER
A woman I don't know is boiling tea the Indian way in my kitchen. ~ Bharati Mukherjee, THE MANAGEMENT OF GRIEF
My mother swore we'd never live in a boardinghouse again, but circumstances did not allow her to keep this promise. ~ Tobias Wolff, FIRELIGHT
I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. ~ Denis Johnson
Being a Spokane Indian, I only pick up Indian hitchhikers. ~ Sherman Alexie, THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD
Fact is the care needs to be sold in a hurry, and Leo sends Toni out to do it. ~ Raymond Carver, ARE THESE ACTUAL MILES?
You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. ~ Lorrie Moore, YOU'RE UGLY TOO
First there must be a mechanism that allows entry: an invisible zipper a wave of heat shimmer that ripples the landscape, an incantation, a click. ~ Lisa Moore, GETTING AWAY WITH IT
Women's lips are paler again. ~ Margaret Atwood, SPRING SONG OF THE FROGS
At age sevetny-one, Perpetua Resch could honestly say she had loved only four people: her mother, her father, her brother Martin and her sister Magda. ~ Jacqueline Baker, BLOODWOOD
The father was drinking again, in celebration. ~ Lynn Coady, PLAY THE MONSTER BLIND
Once, long ago, for just a few minutes I tried to pretend I was Harry Lapwing. ~ Mavis Gallant, THE CONCERT PARTY
That boy works as a photographer for the Associated Press. ~ Nancy Lee, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Dad takes the white marten from the trap. ~ Eden Robinson, TRAPLINES
If you were to write a letter out of the blue, typewritten, handwritten, whatever, and remind me that you were once in the same advanced recorder class with me at the
YMCA on the south side of Montreal and that you were the girl given to head colds and black knitted tights and whose Sprightly Music for the Recorder had shed its
binding, then I would, feigning a little diffidence, try to shore up a coarsened image of the winter of 1972. ~ Carol Shields, CHEMISTRY
Mashenka Pavletsky, a young girl who had only just finishe dher studies at a boarding school, returning from a walk to the house of the Kushkins, with whom she was living
as a governess, found hte household in a terrible turmoil. ~ Anton Chekhov, AN UPHEAVAL
Novel: Story Starters
The fourteen story starters below come from successful novels. Whether for short stories or novels, the first sentence serves one purpose—to pique our interest and make us
want to read on.
On a wet night in Thatcher's Britain, a miracle was delivered onto the pockmarked pavement behind a decrepit building once known as Lambeth Hospital. ~ Camilla Gibb, SWEETNESS IN THE BELLY
First, the facts. ~ Richard Russo, BRIDGE OF SIGHS
I have never looked into my sister's eyes. ~ Lori Lansens, THE GIRLS
The only doctor in town was Tailgate Smith. ~ Robert Hilles, A GRADUAL RUIN
The first time I met Cosmo, Your Honour, was in my mother's eyes. ~ Nancy Huston, AN ADORATION
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age—regardless of how they look on hte outside—pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape
from their lives. ~ Douglas Copeland, THE GUM THIEF
All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. ~ Kiran Desai, THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
I only looked away for a moment.
One morning toward the end of the summer they burned away my face my little brother and I were playing on the bank of the river that flowed past the eatern edge of our
old neighbourhood, on the grassy floodplain that had been my people's home and misery for centuries. ~ Dennis Bock, THE ASH GARDEN
Storms are sex. ~ Kevin Patterson, CONSUMPTION
The trees whoosh in the wind, their leaves are green and black in the Ford headlights that bounce up and down through the grey dust of the road. ~ Marilyn Bowering, WHAT IT TAKE TO BE HUMAN
I went to England to see my daughter. ~ Richard Wright, OCTOBER
On a sweltering afternoon in early June, Celia Fox stands at the railing of her deck and smokes the second-to-last cigarette she'll allow herself before going to work. ~ Barbara Gowdy, HELPLESS
I seem to have trouble dying. ~ Lawrence Hill, THE BOOK OF NEGROES
Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami. ~ Khaled Hosseini, A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS
