Good beginnings

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Beginnings are difficult. When your conflict is simple and very external it's not difficult to pull off in media res. In my case I'm finding myself writing about largely internal or societal conflicts that the protagonist has to first discover exist in the first place and even when they do there's rarely a short snappy one paragraph explanation of it.

My current project is a slower burn in general so like I'm actually really struggling to come up with an opening line that doesn't sound like it's out of a fanfiction. Right now the opening is the protagonist muddling through his morning routine and sprinkling in a few hints about him and how he falls short of expectations.

Barely awake, he stumbles into his uniform. It’s too big. He’d gotten a few sizes too big originally, in hopes he’d grow into it. It’s his final year of highschool, if it doesn’t fit now, it likely never will.

Like this does an excellent job but at the same time I'm aware many trope savvy readers will catch the cliche "waking up late for school/work opening scene" trope from Mars with their naked eyes.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I like starting with a sound or even in the middle of a conversation and then slowly doing the exposition

 

[Rustyoznail]

View attachment 2188881

Be careful @AWhoopsieDaisy. "High school" is a potential trigger for tripping over the underage rule. Be very clear very early he's over 18 and add a note in the notes to Admin field highlighting the line.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

View attachment 2188881

Be careful @AWhoopsieDaisy. "High school" is a potential trigger for tripping over the underage rule. Be very clear very early he's over 18 and add a note in the notes to Admin field highlighting the line.

I'd use "senior year" if it didn't take place in Japan. He's explicitly referred to as being 18. I've also considered bumping him up go being in college but the uniform bit wouldn't work at that point.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I'd still add a note to Laurel. I suspect a bot scans the stories for keywords and puts them on hold for a manual check.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Things I tend NOT to like at the beginning:
1. Too much backstory.
3. Too much scene setting. Sometimes it's important, but it can go on too long.

These are likely my Achilles heel when it comes to erotica. I'm a character and setting builder. I want to know who the character is and what situation has brought them to this point. The eighteen-year-old boy and the horny MILF next door is a yawner for me unless there is something interesting about them and the situation, beyond that they both want to fuck.

I do try to keep it short, and I do edit quite a bit during that process, but I'm not entirely successful at it. But so far my responses have been good so I'll keep doing my thing. I don't do stroke erotica. It's not stories about sex, but stories that feature sex.

 

[HeyAll]

My biggest turn-off is when someone opens with a description of the weather or sunrise. I don't care who the author is, it's an overused, pointless intro, unless relevant to the story.




Off the top of my head, this is my favorite story intro. "Relentless" by Simon Kernick




I only heard the phone because the back door was open. I was outside breaking up a fight between my two kids over which one of them should have the bubble-blowing machine, and it was threatening to turn ugly. To my dying day, I will always wonder what would have happened if the door had been shut, or the noise of the kids had been so loud that I hadn’t heard it.

It had just turned three o’clock on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in late May, and my whole world was about to collapse.

I ran back inside the house, into the living room, where the football was just kicking off on the TV, and picked up on about the fourth ring, wondering whether it was that perma-tanned bastard of a boss of mine, Wesley “Call me Wes” O’Shea, phoning to discuss a minor detail on a client proposal. He liked to do that on weekends, usually when there was a football match on. It gave him a perverse sense of power.

I looked at my watch. One minute past three.

“Hello?”

“Tom, it’s me, Jack.” The voice was breathless.

I was momentarily confused. “Jack who?”

“Jack . . . Jack Calley.”

This was a voice from the past. My best friend when we were at school. The best man at my wedding nine years earlier. But also someone I hadn’t spoken to in close to four years. There was something wrong, too. He sounded in pain, struggling to get the words out.

“Long time no speak, Jack. How are you?”

“You’ve got to help me.”

It sounded like he was running, or walking very quickly. There was background noise, but I couldn’t tell what it was. He was definitely outside.

“What do you mean?”

“Help me. You’ve got to . . .” He gasped suddenly. “Oh Jesus, no. They’re coming.”

“Who’s coming?”

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

I'd still add a note to Laurel. I suspect a bot scans the stories for keywords and puts them on hold for a manual check.

Noted!

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

It's not stories about sex, but stories that feature sex.

Hallelujah! a fellow plot goblin!

 

[Voboy]

These are likely my Achilles heel when it comes to erotica. I'm a character and setting builder. I want to know who the character is and what situation has brought them to this point. The eighteen-year-old boy and the horny MILF next door is a yawner for me unless there is something interesting about them and the situation, beyond that they both want to fuck.

I do try to keep it short, and I do edit quite a bit during that process, but I'm not entirely successful at it. But so far my responses have been good so I'll keep doing my thing. I don't do stroke erotica. It's not stories about sex, but stories that feature sex.

Here's what I do. I borrow from a very influential passage in a Christopher Tolkien book I read years ago, something to the effect of his daddy JRR having some sort of written backstory for literally every reference in LOTR and the Hobbit. Meaning, every time a character made a reference in the books, however small, there existed some sort of monograph, story, poem, song, or map that Tolkien had already constructed, in some cases years before. Christopher felt that that gave his father's works the kind of depth and internal consistency that make them read less like fantasy and more like reality.

So I write down a lot of backstory, especially for SF and fantasy stories. I do not intend for these little paragraphs to be published, but they exist. They are canon, if you want to use that term, in my interconnected universe. So when I'm writing the main story, for publication, the backstory exists... but I don't retype it verbatim in the main piece.

I do "reference" events from those little backstories and ideas. Different characters have different perspectives on those unpublished events. It leads to in-jokes, flirtations, secrets... all the sorts of things that can lend verisimilitude to a story, without (important, this) bogging down the narrative for the reader.

So the backstory appears in the story. But not as an expositive wall of text, and certainly not at the beginning of the piece. Bits of that backstory trickle out throughout the tale, and by the end of the piece (provided I've told the story skillfully enough), the reader has a good idea of what the backstory is without losing the flow of my narrative.

 

[SimonDoom]

Here's what I do. I borrow from a very influential passage in a Christopher Tolkien book I read years ago, something to the effect of his daddy JRR having some sort of written backstory for literally every reference in LOTR and the Hobbit. Meaning, every time a character made a reference in the books, however small, there existed some sort of monograph, story, poem, song, or map that Tolkien had already constructed, in some cases years before. Christopher felt that that gave his father's works the kind of depth and internal consistency that make them read less like fantasy and more like reality.

So I write down a lot of backstory, especially for SF and fantasy stories. I do not intend for these little paragraphs to be published, but they exist. They are canon, if you want to use that term, in my interconnected universe. So when I'm writing the main story, for publication, the backstory exists... but I don't retype it verbatim in the main piece.

I do "reference" events from those little backstories and ideas. Different characters have different perspectives on those unpublished events. It leads to in-jokes, flirtations, secrets... all the sorts of things that can lend verisimilitude to a story, without (important, this) bogging down the narrative for the reader.

So the backstory appears in the story. But not as an expositive wall of text, and certainly not at the beginning of the piece. Bits of that backstory trickle out throughout the tale, and by the end of the piece (provided I've told the story skillfully enough), the reader has a good idea of what the backstory is without losing the flow of my narrative.

If I recall, Dune is told this way, too. The world of Dune is incredibly complex and confusing, and its backstory is revealed only bit by bit. There's much that is never explained in the first book, but I don't think the reader is any the worse off for it. Aside from not inundating the reader with too much data too quickly, another advantage of telling the story this way is that the reader discovers things along with the main character, and finding out the truth is part of what makes the reader want to turn (or scroll down) the page.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I don't like reading stories that serve up a pile of detail in one hit, so I try and avoid that in my writing. With literally thousands of stories here, I spend a bit of time crafting the first couple of paragraphs so it grabs the reader's attention and they'll hopefully keep reading.