Set a timer to five minutes. Write the opening scene without explaining your character’s full backstory, their world, or the lesson they’ve learned. Set the character down in a place, give them a want, and introduce just one small problem. The result will feel a bit ragged, but it’ll let you see whether your story can start with momentum instead of a long, elaborate doorway into the backstory.
Many early drafts begin far away from the moment they should start. The writer wants the audience to know all of the things first, so the opening becomes an accumulation of fact: where the character came from, the thing that happened years ago, how they generally act and feel, and why this situation matters. Some of that background will need to be in the draft, eventually. But at the start, too much explanation risks the audience waiting to see whether your story is going to begin.
The strongest opening gives your reader or listener just enough information to stay with your character through a particular scene. Let’s say a character is standing outside a classroom with a written apology in their pocket. I don’t need three paragraphs to detail every disagreement that brought the character here. All I need to know is that the note is significant, the character is wavering, and someone is likely to show up before they’ve made up their mind. All you have to do is set up the scene that way, create enough pressure, and then give the audience a reason to continue reading.
There’s a test you can run: Look for the first sentence at which a visible event occurs. An event in which a character knocks, conceals, chooses, responds, drops, rejects, or attends to something that changes the scene’s dynamic. If the first sentence with a visible event occurs halfway through the page, try pushing it to the top of the page. You don’t need to cut every sentence before it immediately. Take the sentence with the visible event and copy it into your draft, and then start the scene with that sentence. Then you can add just enough background so the audience understands what happens next.
Backstory works most when it provides answers to a question raised by the scene. Let’s say a character is refusing to open a letter. Maybe we want to know why. The character could now mention the last letter they got. The scene itself is now a point from which you can add in some context. If you give the same info before the letter is presented, it may seem more like instruction than a story. It’s a slight alteration, but a big one: you begin your opening by attracting attention and then providing information.
Writers often worry that starting later will confuse their readers. Confusion will occur, but it usually results from a lack of stakes, unclear point of view, or too many unnamed details, not an inability to give a complete history. A clean opening will not need that. Focus on one character and establish their setting. Place either a want or a worry in the scene, and introduce some sort of obstacle. The reader is left to understand the source of the pressure, and to be worried about what happens next, and the story is functioning properly.
Once the scene is in the draft, try reading the opening aloud. Listen to find where your voice becomes more interested. It may be in the exact moment you decided the story had to start. Draw your attention to the lines you read before, and ask yourself what each one accomplishes. Does it establish the setting and provide background, create the sense of urgency, establish the tone, or lay out a solid story beat? Or does it provide information the scene hasn’t made us care about yet? The story doesn’t have to start with full disclosure of the world it takes place in; just give your readers a reason to keep going to the next line.