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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37456
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37456
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

At this point: **don't sweat it.**

You've got ideas, and you need to put something on paper (or the computer) to get yourself started. So **take _one_ of those ideas and go with it.** Any half-way decent opening will do as well as any other at this point, _because you aren't writing something that your readers will see;_ you're writing for yourself. I very much suspect that even "it was a dark and stormy night", cliché as it is by now, will work better than no opening at all. Or open one of your favourite books to the first page and borrow the opening (but make sure to replace it with one of your own before you do anything serious with the manuscript). This is even more true if you know where you'll want to take your story within, say, the first few chapters, because you will be writing to get from whatever opening you choose to that point anyway.

Now, this isn't to say that you will end up picking the best opening, or even the best one out of those you have in your mind. Maybe you'll think of changes that you need to make to it after you've written the first few pages, or maybe you'll have finished half a book by the time you notice that the opening just doesn't work at all and needs to be yanked out with extreme pride and prejudice, and replaced with something entirely different. _But that's okay;_ you are going to be doing plenty of editing anyway, both in terms of details and in terms of big swathes of text, and the opening isn't really special in that regard.

Bottom line: once you have _some_ opening in place, and start writing, you can always tweak it (or replace it entirely, for that matter) later in the process of writing and editing. So put _something_ there, and hold off on worrying about editing it.

Original score: 9