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The first sentence. It’s fatuous and stupid to say that the first sentence is the most important in a short story because so many are important, and yet it does have a certain onus that most other sentences in the story don’t have, namely, it must draw the reader in. Immediately. Some people, usually those who don’t know that much about good writing, often refer to “a hook,” but it’s difficult to define what exactly a hook is other than some quirky gimmick of plot that’s supposed to enthrall readers. Gimmicks can work in genre fiction, but on the whole, gimmicks don’t grab the attention of readers. Good writing does.

What constitutes good writing? Well, that’s a lengthy discussion for another essay, but good beginnings are usually readily apparent to most readers, and there are some simple ways to achieve a good beginning for writers just learning the craft. Here are three.

Character

Start with the character. He or she and what happens to him or her is what the story is going to be about, so let us know who it is right off the bat. There are a few of ways to approach the character. First, you can start with a purely physical description, something like this:

Marty Tanner was forty years old and fat. He hadn’t always been fat, but it’d been fifteen years since his gut first started hanging over his belt. And it wasn’t only his gut. His arms were fleshy, he had those rolls that wrap around the back, and even under his pale chin he was starting to grow another. At one time he had a beard to disguise that emerging second chin, but the beard got so scratchy, especially in summer, that he finally shaved it off. While he was at it, he also shaved off his hair. He wasn’t completely bald, but he did have a crew-cut that he never let grow longer than half an inch.

Here is a beginning about a character named Marty Tanner. It’s a purely physical description, and it’s not even complete; we don’t know what color his skin is, we don’t know what clothes he’s wearing, we don’t know the color of his eyes, the shape of his nose, or how long his fingers are, but it’s still a good introduction into Marty Tanner. From here, the story could go a number of directions, all branching from the root of his physical characteristics, but the point is there’s a solid beginning. Now, here’s another way we can begin a story about Marty Tanner, that is, beginning a story with a character. Rather than giving a physical description, we can start by discussing who Marty is:

Marty Tanner loved video games, loved comic books, loved science-fiction novels, and barely graduated from high school. He was certainly smart enough to graduate. Many of his teachers constantly commented to Marty and his parents about how smart he was and how he wasn’t working up to his potential. But Marty’s problem was that he was usually so bored by his studies that he preferred to spend his time playing video games or reading comic books and science fiction novels. His favorite video game was Doom, and his favorite novel was Dune. He thought that was cool how his two favorite things almost rhymed.

Again, you now have a solid root from which many branches of a story could grow. In this paragraph there are no physical characteristics. We don’t know what Marty looks like at all. And yet, by focusing on just a little bit about Marty, we have begun to develop a character who has an enormous amount of potential. Another way of starting a story about a character is to discuss immediately what he or she thinks or is thinking. For instance:

Marty hated when cakes had too much frosting. It wasn’t that he didn’t like frosting. Far from it. He loved frosting, especially the coconut frosting on a German chocolate cake. But Marty thought even the best things could be ruined when out of proportion, and if a cake had so much frosting that it overwhelmed the cake, Marty thought it wasn’t worth eating. He also didn’t like too little frosting, but he tended to be more forgiving of that little sin.

Or, if you want to up the ante, you can have your character think about something more significant, such as this:

Marty sympathized with both sides of the issue on capital punishment. Yes, it was rather barbaric for the state to sanction the murder of an individual, no matter what he did, and certainly that state practicing barbarism could only make the state more barbaric. On the other hand, was it any more humane to lock away the same person in a tiny cell for thirty years? And if a person did commit a heinous act, something like raping and stabbing a five year old girl, well, did we really want that person around in the world?

Thus, here are four ways to begin a story using a character. All start with the same character, but each is a different approach into that character.

Setting

Rather than trying to immediately establish who the story is about, go ahead and give the setting, and merely describe the physical details. If you pick a spot you know that actually exists, this almost becomes an exercise in journalism. For instance:

The blue house was built in the 19th century, was two stories tall and needed a paint job desperately. Fronting the house was a massive porch that also needed painting with a porch swing that hung from a rusty pair of chains. The front yard was small and had one massive maple smack in the center, and the back yard, which was huge, hadn’t been mowed in a long time, so the grass was knee-high.

With this paragraph, we have no idea what the story is going to be about, but we know where it’s set, or at least where it begins. To continue, you could walk inside and begin to describe the innards of the house, or you could bring a character into the scene, have him or her walking up to the massive front porch. The point is there is now a concrete setting.

A couple quick notes about storytelling before we move on. The instinct of many young writers is to have the story completely mapped out in their head before they begin writing. That tends to make for bad stories. As the great short story writer Flannery O’Conner wrote, “If you the writer aren’t surprised by what’s happening, the reader is not going to be surprised.” In other words, if you know how a story is going to end before you even begin it, then the reader will be pretty able to predict that ending, too, and therefore will be bored. So when you sit down to write the beginning, don’t worry about the end or even the next paragraph. Just write a solid opening paragraph, and see where it leads.

The other note worth mentioning is that all of the beginnings discussed so far, and almost every beginning to every story, have one thing in common: they’re concrete. That is, they’re not vague, foggy or confusing. They are very specific, very detailed, and they give the reader a clear image. In the first example, a reader can easily see Marty Tanner’s fat, and in the second example, the reader clearly knows what Marty is like. And in the most recent example, the reader can clearly see the old blue house. Concrete is key.

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