How To Begin A Story
On effective ways to start your novel, your short story, your essay, and establishing a contract with your reader.
The opening of a story needs to do multiple things. It establishes the contract between you and the reader: this is the story I’m going to tell you, this is the sort of story you’re getting, this is the world and the characters, this is why you’re reading, this is a sense of the themes, the underlying journey, the big idea at the heart of it, and also, word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, you want to keep reading.
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