How Can You Tell If You’re Starting Your Story in the Right Place?

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She is hosting a free masterclass for novelists on Sept. 22, Excellent Openings.

When I help my clients prepare the pitch materials for their novel, it’s not just the query and synopsis we focus on—it’s their opening pages. 

Because it doesn’t matter how snappy that query letter is, or how promising that synopsis reads: If the opening pages of the story itself don’t suck the agent or editor in, those pages won’t have the desired effect on readers, which means the book won’t sell.

Needless to say, books that don’t sell are not the type of books agents and editors are interested in.

I’ve written elsewhere about the basics that pros are looking for in the opening pages of a novel: A clear point of view, a compelling voice, compelling characters, specific details, and tension of some type.

I’ve also noted the less obvious things: an internal struggle/vulnerability/weakness that signals the beginning of a character arc; one or more story elements that raise questions, thereby stimulating the reader’s curiosity; and well-integrated backstory.

But none of that answers a burning question so many of us have: How do I know if I’m actually starting in the right place?

After all, there are many different places in the overall timeline of your novel that your story could begin. So what makes one option superior to another?

Beginning writers tend to waffle around at the beginning of a story with a lot of what some folks refer to as “throat clearing”—hence the common injunction to get things moving quickly, and to get the inciting incident on the page as soon as possible.

But take it from me, because I’ve seen it many times: Openings written to the letter of this advice are generally either unintelligible, hard to care about, or both.

“Get the inciting incident on the page as soon as possible” is good advice. But it’s important to understand what “as possible” actually means.

After all, we could all start with The Thing That Sets the Plot into Motion, right? That is always actually possible, in the most basic sense: we could start with the car crash, the aliens landing on the front lawn, the mysterious letter arriving in the mail, or what have you.

But published novels that actually do so are rare. And even movies generally don’t attempt to start with the fireworks of the inciting incident, despite screenwriting’s focus on action, action, and more action.

They aren’t doing that because we first need enough information to understand what the inciting incident means to the protagonist, and why we should care. And to accomplish that, you generally need to get three things on the page before the inciting incident of your novel.

1. Basic context

If we have no idea where the story is taking place, and no context about the protagonist’s life, we cannot understand what the inciting incident means.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re writing a space opera in which the protagonist is the first mate on a faster-than-light ship bound for a utopian settlement on a rugged, borderline uninhabitable planet on far reaches of the galaxy—and the inciting incident is a blow to the ship’s hull delivered by a hitherto-unknown alien species.

In order for us to understand what that event means in this story, you need to start in a place that allows you to establish the important bits here: the mission of the ship, the sorts of people aboard, and why they decided to pack up their entire lives for Planet X.

You probably also need to start in a way that allows you to establish how far the ship is away from that planet, what recourse to help or aid they may have, and what is currently known (if anything) about alien species in general.

2. Problems

Your opening also needs to establish who the protagonist of the novel is—and whoever that is, we need to see some problems in this person’s life well before this new alien species decides to ram the hull of their ship with disagreeable bits of antimatter.

In storytelling terms, problems are some sort of external trouble that’s indicative of an internal issue. And though it may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually these sorts of issues that make us care about the protagonist (white setting up what the inciting incident will mean for them, emotionally speaking).

For our space opera, let’s say the external trouble is a power struggle between the first mate and the arrogant chief engineer, which results in a few stern words from the captain to the first mate: If you don’t have what it takes to enforce my authority on this ship, I’ll find someone who does.

And let’s say that this, along with the internal narration of the protagonist, reveals the protagonist’s internal issue: She has imposter syndrome, despite her long list of accomplishments, and therefore fails to command respect.

3. What the protagonist wants, and why

And this in turn helps to establish the third essential ingredient of our opening trifecta, which is what the protagonist longs for—which is to say, what they want.

In this case, let’s say that what the protagonist wants is to be respected as a leader.

And why do they want that? Perhaps because her mother was a legendary ship’s captain. Perhaps even the captain of the ship that established the original utopian settlement on this distant, inhospitable planet. 

All told, that’s the context we need in order to understand what it really means when this new alien species takes aggressive action against their ship, killing the captain in the process—and making our first mate with imposter syndrome the new captain of a ship under siege.

Will our first mate successfully navigate the fraught territory of first contact? Will she manage to quell the infighting that arises on her ship, and keep the chief engineer from leading a mutiny—long enough to unravel the truth about Planet X, and what really happened to the utopian settlement there?

All that remains to be seen. But given this sort of setup, chances are good that the reader will actually care enough about the protagonist, and understand enough about the story, to read on.

Could this story actually start with the aliens ramming the hull, and then backtrack to cover all of those essential bits I’ve spoken to here? Sure. But that’s a complicated maneuver, and one that would be hard to pull off (maintaining forward momentum with the storyline following that event, while also backtracking to cover the story’s basic bases).

The stronger tactic, generally speaking, is to do what 99 percent of all those books and movies you love actually do: Start just long enough before the inciting incident to establish these three things—the context in which the inciting incident will occur, the main problem in your protagonist’s life prior to it occurring, and what it is this protagonist of yours longs for in life.

Once you’ve established those three things in your novel—whether it takes you three pages or thirty—your reader will be ready for the inciting incident.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join Susan for a free masterclass for novelists on Sept. 22, Excellent Openings.

Susan DeFreitas

Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. An independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing.