How to Begin

First lines are a problem. Beginner writers are taught they must hook the reader’s interest and reel them in like a fish. Readers are slippery and unwilling. Attention spans are short. The only point of a first sentence is to get the reader onto the next, making effective writing a matter of bait. The classic example, the one that gets trotted out even more than the whole fish thing, is Orwell’s clocks striking thirteen. It’s the specificity, they say. The detail that demands the question: what’s gone wrong with this world?

Robbie Arnott’s Dusk (2024) begins with a threat. ‘Word reached the twins that a puma was taking shepherds up in the highlands.’ A good writing teacher might walk through the logical flow of questions here, starting with the surprise of the puma. What’s it doing up there? And what will the twins do with this unsettling news?

Even when the first line is quiet on purpose, it’s possible to talk about a lure being cast. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (2022) begins, as students are taught never, ever to do, with the weather. ‘When we left the hotel it was raining, a light, fine rain, as can sometimes happen in Tokyo in October.’ Everything hinges on a single word that receives very little inflection. Hotel. You pass over it quickly, a traveller yourself, and the questions ripple out in your wake. A journey. An unknown purpose. It’s a book that feels easy – crystalline sentences, a steady flow – but right from the first sentence, it withholds.

Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) has an understated opening too, full of domestic weariness. ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives.’ There are the pieces: the bourgeois comforts, the distance from the centre, the sense that something’s about to give. Now imagine that sentence again without the last three words.

There’s Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, originally published in French in 1951. A stunning novel that took her a trillion years to write, it opens with the assigning of roles. ‘My dear Mark, Today I went to see my physician Hermogenes.’ The reader as confidante, then. The reader as ally. Sit down, I’ve given you a job. The foreword to Laila Lalami’s speculative fiction novel The Dream Hotel (2025) does something similar, coaxing the reader into compliance. ‘You’re a good person; if you were in a position to stop disaster, you probably would.’

Then there are the arrivals, arguably the simplest method of all to declare a beginning. In Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (2023) the voice is clipped. Tired, even. ‘Arrive finally at about three.’ In the prologue of Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018), it’s announced with humour. ‘It was Owen’s first time in the big country town that thought it was a city.’ And in Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow (2024), it’s the purchase of a pet rabbit. ‘They found him through an advertisement on Gumtree.’ Effortless. Unfussy. But also strangely dreamy and musical because who even says ‘advertisement’ these days?

In his 1992 craft book The Art of Fiction, David Lodge lists out several other possibilities for beginnings. Some seem especially old hat now. Set-piece descriptions. Philosophical reflections. Rude, Holden Caulfield-like gestures to literary traditions. Even ‘frame stories’ that explain how the main story was discovered, as in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898).

And what other advice has popular writing education moved on from? The sly, conspiratorial jokes of Calvino? The earnest declarations of C.S. Lewis? ‘Once there were four children.’ The not-so-earnest declarations of James Joyce? ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was.’ Or the decisive confidence of epics like The Odyssey? ‘Sing to me of the man, muse.’ Those first lines that say, ‘Quiet now, we’re about to begin.’

Charles Baxter once observed that America was flooded with books on how to write fiction. ‘American culture has always been pragmatic, at least from the early nineteenth century; there is a feeling in this culture that you can learn how to do anything,’ he said in an interview with Graeme Harper in Inside Creative Writing (2012). ‘We have spawned a culture of creative writing, and sometimes it seems that we have more writers than readers, and that “creative writing” in this country is a giant Ponzi scheme.’

Baxter had already written a craft book of his own by that point, The Art of Subtext (2007), plus the brilliant essay collection, Burning Down the House (1997), and has since followed it up with one more, also brilliant, collection, Wonderlands (2022). So whatever his misgivings, he’s thrown his oar in too.

In Australia, the amateur writing education market outside of the universities is not as well developed as in the United States – population differences and all that – but it’s not exactly small either. Short courses are offered by state writers’ centres, as well as industry bodies like the Australian Society of Authors, community colleges, commercial operators and schools sitting with publishers and literary journals, like Faber Academy and Kill Your Darlings.

The offerings are a mixed bag. Some are about personal development, finding community and the pleasure of trying out a new creative skill. Others focus on explicit career goals. Finishing your novel. Polishing for publication. Pitching and querying. Or any of the steps that might one day – possibly, maybe – lead to actually earning an income from creative work.

The popular craft books are harder to catch in one net and there are relatively few Australian titles. Some older ones still get word-of-mouth recommendations, like Kate Grenville’s The Writing Book (1990), Garry Disher’s Writing Fiction (2001) and the short story-focused Cracking the Spine (2014), with contributions from Tony Birch, Claire Aman and Ryan O’Neill, among others.

The novelist Charlotte Wood released a candid and engaging collection of author interviews, The Writer’s Room (2016), along with the philosophical essay collection The Luminous Solution (2021). Other Australian works on craft include Eugen Bacon’s imaginative handbook Writing Speculative Fiction (2019), Lee Kofman’s The Writer Laid Bare (2022) and Graeme Simsion’s The Novel Project (2022).

The bulk of writing books available here, however, are from overseas. There are the enduring classics, such as the part-memoirs of Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott and Stephen King, along with Ursula K. Le Guin’s eminently sensible Steering the Craft (1998). There are a whole lot of pompous books by men named James or John, although a pass goes to the delightful John McPhee and his Draft No. 4 (2017) – and new titles just keep coming. Literary agony uncle George Saunders recently took a turn, drawing on insights from nineteenth-century Russian literature. Charlie Jane Anders wrote about storytelling as a way to survive hard times, and Matt Bell about revision. Elizabeth McCracken’s released a craft book too. And that’s not to forget all the save-the-cat guides, NaNoWriMo pep talks, psuedo-sciencey storytelling ‘hacks’ and bluntly efficient manuals:

You see where this is going. But perhaps this is the inevitable conclusion of a culture that believes the true measure of success is speed and that all answers can be googled, even what happens in your own book.

In fairness, the market for writing advice is a big swamp. At one end, there are published literary writers who have, as they say, done the work. At the other, there are some muppets on Reddit crowing about how to crack 10k words a day. New writers must quickly decide who they want to listen to and what they want to pay for, and naturally, goals and approaches differ. Yet in all this, it often feels like the advice about openings is veering in the same direction.

‘Obviously you want to hook someone on the story,’ said novelist Rebbecca Makkai in an interview early in her career, when she was asked about her approach to opening lines. ‘You want the person standing there in the bookstore not to be able to put it down.’ The promo pitch for a recent short course at one of the state writers’ centres put it this way: ‘If the first few pages of a story are weak, chances are no one will ever get to the middle, let alone the end.’ Prospective students were told they didn’t have to grab the reader by the throat, ‘although that might work’; they could also ‘seduce them with a beguiling voice, tease them with a curious premise or charm them with an interesting character’.

Striptease metaphors aside, the basic message is familiar. For some time now, emerging writers have been encouraged to lay the bait straight away, preferably with a character set in motion with clear needs and goals, or failing that, through some other immediate conflict or intriguing question.

‘Make readers feel the story has started. They want to be in your world, not be told about it. Don’t preface – plunge in,’ urges Jerome Stern in Making Shapely Fiction (1991), incidentally capturing the huge influence of screen culture on twentieth-century literary style. Janet Burroway, in her iconic Writing Fiction (1982) offers: ‘If you can’t find a way to introduce tension on the first page, you may have to question whether you have a story at all.’

Today, it’s not just the buyer in the bookstore that writers have to win over. When Australian agent Caitlan Cooper-Trent gave her advice for an ASA blog post, she was extraordinarily diplomatic. ‘Agents are often time poor and have seen many submissions that day, so it’s important to get to the point,’ she suggested. ‘[T]he manuscript sample should introduce some kind of question, or action, that keeps the reader engaged.’

Makkai, in her own Substack, goes into more detail than most when she examines the different kinds of tension commonly employed in openings. These include atmospheric tension, dramatic (or diegetic) tension, narrative (or non-diegetic) tension, and what she calls ‘chronic character tension’, arising from contradictions in character. ‘[T]ension in an opening scene or paragraph is a lot of what gets us into the story,’ she writes. ‘We don’t know or care about these characters yet, we don’t owe the author a read […] but if we’re presented with compelling tension, a scene we simply must read to the end of, it can carry us through until we do feel oriented, and invested, and committed.’

It becomes a race. Get it done already. In my notes for one course I did, taught by an Australian novelist, I have: ‘HOW LONG DOES THE READER HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL SOMETHING HAPPENS??’ (All caps for major epiphany, I suppose.)

Michael Cunningham provides the textbook example. Sharing early drafts of his novel The Hours (1998) in the coffee-table book The Work of Art (2024), he brings the role of editing into sharp focus. ‘It was the morning of the day Mr Dalloway would end his life,’ was how one of his very early drafts started, loosely inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). The final version of The Hours, the one that made it to print and won Cunningham a Pulitzer, begins with Woolf herself, setting her immediately into action. ‘She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather.’ A coat that already has anyone with even a passing knowledge of Woolf’s life and death thinking ahead. (The opening of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is, of course, unforgettable for a different reason, with its impatience, and its need, and its small glimpse of a wider world.)

In his debut novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Michael Ondaatje goes straight to the heart of it. ‘The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ The line still floors me, even if it comes somewhere round the middle of the novel. I’ve never quite known how to take it. Does it show Ondaatje’s confidence as a writer? Or its opposite?

Perhaps the anxiety that now threads through popular writing education is nothing surprising. Wider cultural discussions about literature centre the attention economy, smartphones, generational shifts, competition with screen culture, and the woes (and big-dollar mergers) of traditional publishing. Sales of adult fiction might be strong relative to other categories, and romance may be booming, but the overall message is still the same: reading habits have changed. A smart writer treats readers like skittish tunafish.

Yet I do find it surprising – maybe naively – to see fiction-writing advice so reliably framed in terms of bait and resource scarcity. Seen this way, writing is a race against time. The readers are already leaving the room; if you are good enough, and also very lucky, you might catch one of the last. Part of what I dislike about this is how depressing it all is. Why bother, et cetera? (Though being an emerging writer is a bit like being six months pregnant. With the choice already made, you rely on ignorance and hope.) Mainly though, it feels like a very constrained picture of what fiction is and can be, and beyond that, what we can be to each other. When did we get so transactional and impatient about everything?

In the writing education landscape, at least, the ‘rules’ about how to write have been taking shape for much longer than we’ve been rating Uber drivers out of five. From the early craft manuals by writers like Edith Wharton and E.M. Forster through to the mushrooming of tertiary writing courses, particularly since the 1970s, the gradual professionalisation of writing as a discipline has shaped the teaching of it.

Side note: this professionalisation has had little to do with writers reliably earning a sustainable income. It’s more of a nebulous expectation that writers take their practice ‘seriously’. For students, this has meant investing in education. For established writers, it’s the pressure to be both maverick explorer and sole trader, cultural observer and entrepreneur. Self-sustaining, that is. A good business partner. And preferably not bugging anyone for grants or soup or handouts. So, while a market was emerging for writing advice, writers themselves were also being coached to sell their expertise alongside their actual work.  

Whether or not you see this as the beginnings of a pyramid scheme, the foundations appear to be shifting again. Australian humanities degrees are now, by policy, prohibitively priced. It remains to be seen how this will affect the next generation of emerging writers and writing teachers, though it’s probably fair to expect that what’s taught at the more affordable, amateur end of the education market will have a growing influence on the Australian literary landscape.

For now, however, this odd bit of market circuitry simply means that there are almost endless opportunities to hear from working writers, whether through their teaching roles or promotional activities like self-published newsletters, podcasts and interviews. There is often real comfort here. As writers talk candidly about their working lives – the problems and very personal solutions they’ve devised – they can temper the apparent inviolability of more general, prescriptive writing advice.

As for the trend towards immediacy in fiction, many published writers are circumspect. Charlotte Wood, while she isn’t talking about openings specifically, considers the pleasures of a good sentence in The Luminous Solution. Here, she weighs aspects like clarity, musicality, authority and flair. ‘Aspiring writers are sometimes dismayed by this kind of talk,’ she writes. ‘I think they’re bored by an intensity of attention to what feels like such insignificant stuff, as if they’re being asked to focus on the flakes of paint on a window frame when there’s a dramatic view just beyond the glass. They’ve been trained by the market to think that the view – the subject matter, the narrative – is all that matters.’

Putting aside Wood’s (admittedly popular) assumptions that money ruins art, and that kids today don’t have it in them, what is interesting is her defence of art – that is, the layers of meaning that are built through a writer’s choices around form, style and execution. After all, humans are creatures who think in the figurative. A sentence delivered in a staccato burst hits differently to a wandering, branching, dreamy tangent. (Or, for that matter, David Foster Wallace’s aggressively cluttered 900-word sentence in the short story ‘Mister Squishy’, which Hannah Smart spent a year trying to diagram.) This is because meaning is more than a matter of dictionary definitions. It’s also embedded in how the reading experience is embodied – how it unfolds over time, and how the rhythms of language feel in relation to the beats of our own bodies. So it’s understandable why Wood might be frustrated with the contemporary fixation on plot and narrative over all else. The else is the fun stuff. It’s what puts us in our skin and makes us feel human.

This is not to ignore the fact that genres have their own conventions, which can include tension and immediacy. Genre and commercial fiction shouldn’t be taken as synonymous with ‘bad writing’. N.K. Jemisin’s multi-award-winning Broken Earth fantasy series opens with: ‘Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?’ That simple disjuncture of ideas – starting with the end – neatly sets up a series that uses all kinds of fractures, from geological rifts to split points-of-view, to explore the experience of surviving trauma. 

For all that, I wouldn’t have picked Stephen King – the so-called ‘King of Horror’, who is about as commercially successful as any author can get – to have reservations about the common first-line advice too. When he was asked for his favourite opening, he pointed to Douglas Fairbairn’s Shoot (1978). ‘A line like “This is what happened,” doesn’t actually say anything – there’s zero action or context – but it doesn’t matter,’ he told Joe Fassler, in a piece later reprinted in Light the Dark (2017). ‘It’s a voice, and an invitation, that’s very difficult for me to refuse. It’s like finding a good friend.’

‘You can’t forget that the opening line is important to the writer, too,’ he added. ‘To the person who’s actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both.’  

Few writers, it turns out, want to feel like they’re pulling some kind of stunt with a first line. Even Makkai, with her keen awareness of the buyer in the bookstore, talks about writing good openings in terms of easing the reader’s orientation and settling them into a story – words that suggest acts of care and consideration rather than theft.

Trust me? I mean, that’s a loaded question. Perhaps that’s why I have such trouble with openings. Perhaps, being a general mess of a person, I’m squeamish about asking for trust, or claiming the authority that requires. But deeper than that, I suspect it’s really Ondaatje’s reference to order – ‘very faint, very human’ – that keeps me flipping through my favourites. What is a ‘human’ order anyway?

‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.’ The first line of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is one of my all-time greats, conjuring not just the spectre that haunts the novel but also insinuating the fragility of the reader’s own mind. The famous opening to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) gets under the skin for similar reasons: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ None of us get to choose our dreams. They’re our strongest reminders of how ineffable our inner workings really are, and how much of our lives are shaped by fears, urges and compulsions we can’t rationalise. Not without the help of stories.

The way these two openings speak about human vulnerability ultimately leaves me thinking about unease more than tension. Unease I understand. We all do. It’s physical. To borrow from the philosopher Noga Arikha, if wellbeing is a state ‘in which we do not need to think about our embodied organism in any way’ – no pain, no emotional distress to tend – then its opposite is the call to action.

At least, many of the first lines that grab me do seem to have a clear wrongness to them. The Bell Jar-like opening of Josephine Rowe’s A Loving, Faithful Animal (2016) begins: ‘That was the summer a sperm whale drifted sick into the bay, washed up dead at Mount Martha, and there were many terrible jokes about fertility.’ But it’s not always front and centre, or as loud as the clocks striking thirteen. Sometimes, it’s only a hint, and sometimes the uneasiness you feel as a reader is because everything’s just a little too conspicuously perfect.

Seen like this, perhaps stories, like bodies, are also driven by the homeostatic pull to correct wrongs and find new equilibriums. That would certainly offer one way to think about the task of storytelling – and a familiar one, given the mammoth influence of Joseph Campbell and his hero’s journey on contemporary literary and screen culture. Yet, uneasy openings are not the only way to promise a ‘very human’ order, or to ask for a little patience and trust. The opening of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetic Maud Martha (1953) is simply warm. ‘What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions.’ It’s that last semi-colon for me, that last breath in a sentence of run-on, childish excitement. You almost want to lean across and give that dreamy girl a hug.

So is this a better place to start? Not with hooks and fishing rods, but with walking to the bookshelf and flicking through as many favourites as it takes to remember that the novel is a capacious carpetbag of a form, and that even in this anxious, impatient era, writers can pull off deeply moving works that start with suburban Gumtree transactions? Or even wry little jokes?

Perhaps we start with thinking about trust and all the ways it can be earned, from bold confidence right through to humour that builds a sense of shared history, as if you’re old friends and there’s no question you’ll stick around. Perhaps there are no real strictures beyond the rules each writer creates for themselves – and must then work to keep. That’s the real challenge, of course. Because as Joan Didion once told The Paris Review, ‘What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.’