Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35837
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I don't usually write stories. But my theory about the difficulty of begining writing something is, it depends on assumptions about the audiences. If the story still subject to change, the audience may change too, and make the first line feel different.

In the case I write for myself and didn't intend to publish it anywhere, there could be 2 interpretations. 1. I'm the sole reader, and I simply skip the introduction because I know exactly what it is. 2. I don't know the readers at all yet, and it becomes much more difficult to come up with the first line than all other cases.

It appears to require much work for me to think of a general rule. But the idea is, to have some general idea about your story and your audiences first. Try to contain some hints about how your audiences should have supposedly found this work, instead of making it more meaningful in the story. It's natural that the first line doesn't provide much useful information to non-audiences.

For example, it could sound obvious, or contain details that doesn't matter in most cases. But everything the writer writes is supposedly either things the writer already know, similar to being obvious to the writer, or arbitrary for aesthetic reasons. Just not until the writer had the story in mind. The first sentence could be the most obvious or the most arbitrary thing, that the writer doesn't feel necessary to state explicitly if it wasn't the first sentence, possibly even before they had the story in mind, but as a useful baseline for the reader to expect in the rest of the work.

I come up with two bad enough examples (not a native speaker). Just write something better than these:

- I saw a man dying after being shot by a gun. ("Someone shot him" is enough if it's elsewhere.)
- I heard that from my grandma. (Who cares?)

Anyway it probably shouldn't be the best sentence in the whole work in the normal means. Arguably it can be the worst (but don't make your story deliberately worse, just the worst in it), and tells the audience everything else is better, if you choose this option.

You could reinterpret the options from other sources yourself similarly, such as "external principle" as "the most unfounded or unproven", "simple fact" as "the part of the settings farthest from reality", "introduce voice" as "the most ignorant or unreasonable", etc. But not every option is like this.

Original score: 1