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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48014
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48014
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

## Start with a wind blowing through the normal world

As others have stated, you need to start in the normal world because we need to understand who the main character is, how they live, what they love, what they are capable of, etc. in order to understand what is at stake as the story unfolds.

At the same time, the reader is not going to sit still for scenes of the hero brushing their teeth and reading the newspaper.

So you start with a wind blowing through the normal world, a hint that there is a disturbance coming. In _The Grapes of Wrath_ we start with people going about their normal business, but with a wind (literally) blowing fine dust around that coats everything. At the same time we learn what normal life is like and we see that there is a disruption of normal life coming.

In A Long Expected Party, which others have cited, there is a lot of description of the shire and its life, but it is suffused with a gentle sense of unease -- something is in the wind.

The notions of starting in the normal world and starting in medias res are often seen as in opposition to each other, but if you start with a wind blowing through the normal world, you do both.

Fiction essentially runs on promise: the promise that something interesting is going to happen soon. You don't have to start with an immediate action scene -- one in which we don't know who is fighting who or why or what is at stake -- you can start in the middle of that first hint of disturbance in the normal life of character and their community.

How long you have to spend there, though, varies greatly from story to story. In some cases, you can establish the normal world in a few paragraphs, because it is a normal world we have all seen before. Genre fiction is essentially fiction in which several aspects of the story are predetermined by the genre definition. This allows the storyteller to get on with the story quicker. Part of each genre and subgenre is a base definition of normal world which your story then only needs to invoke and modify for your needs. Got a knights and damsels story to tell? Start off with a tournament. We instantly know the location and the rules of the game. Introduce the unknown knight with the blank shield. A wind is blowing through the normal world.

But whether it takes a paragraph or fifty pages, starting with a wind blowing through the normal world and you will provide both the promise of excitement to come and the necessary background that the reader needs to understand the story when it gets going.

Original score: 3