You’ve built out your characters and their backgrounds. You know the major plot points of your story. You’re ready to start drafting the opening scene of your novel and then you ask yourself:

“Where do I start?”

How do we as writers know the best place to start our books—that’s not so early we have chapters and chapters of backstory and are waiting for the story to start, but not too late that we feel like we’ve rushed to the catalyst without knowing what’s happening or why we care?

We need to have enough context to understand who our main character is and how they’re going to react in the face of a major problem, but we also don’t want the story to drag.

One of our favorite strategies for approaching this question is to start with the catalyst and then work backwards.

The catalyst is the scene in Act 1 where the plot problem is introduced onto the page with a bang, and it kicks off the story’s premise.

We don’t want to start the story right at that event, because it might be disorienting and confusing with little emotional impact. We do want to show their “before” life so our readers can start to care about your characters.

So the question is: how much “before” do we need to show?

The answer to that question depends on how many scenes you need to showcase three things:

✨ what your character wants and why they want that,

✨ what’s getting in the way of what they want,

✨ what their flawed belief is and why they believe it.

If we show those three things, the catalyst will give the reader a major gut impact because we’ll understand why it’s a huge problem for this character.

There’s no right answer for how long it takes. It could take one scene, three scenes, but as long as you introduce your character’s goals, flaws, and obstacles, you’ll give the reader the information they need to feel the emotional impact of the catalyst.

The opening scene teases how your character’s life will start to change. It won’t have the same weighted impact as the catalyst, but it should start to tease the plot problem.

In Pride and Prejudice, the book opens with an argument between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet about marrying their daughters off. It sets the reader up for the themes and conflict that will happen during the novel, but also highlights the ridiculousness of their conversation.

There’s a reason we start with that conversation instead of when wealthy Mr. Bingley (a great marriage prospect) first comes to town. Even though Bingley’s arrival is what introduces a change to the status quo, it’s Lizzie’s family discussing the pursuit of marriage that leads off the story. We don’t need more than this conversation as a set up because it establishes how everyone (including Lizzie) feels about marriage, so when Lizzie meets Darcy at the catalyst, we already know what she wants and believes about wealthy suitors.

In The Hunger Games, we start the book the day of the reaping. While we see Katniss’s regular morning routine and get introduced to her family, we have an added layer of pressure because it’s Reaping Day—and it’s her sister’s first one. Establishing Katniss’s day to day is intentionally shaped around showing us her Internal Goals (keeping her family safe) and Internal Obstacle beliefs (that survival is the only reasonable goal), which is why it’s so impactful when her sister is chosen for The Reaping at the catalyst and Katniss volunteers in her place.

In both of these examples, the authors show us how each of these days hint at the upcoming catalyst, while still exploring what the world looks like leading up to it.

While this is something to consider while drafting, it’s most effective to “finalize” during revisions, after you have the whole story written.

When we’re drafting, we usually need to spend more time in the “before” to help us explore our character. Sometimes that ends up being relegated to backstory and you revise a new opening to the book, and sometimes it’s what we need to kick off the story. The more we learn and discover about our character’s life through drafting, the easier it becomes to decide when the book should begin. The most important thing is to not let your fear of where to start hold you back from starting.

If you’re unsure about where to start your story in a first draft, don’t overthink it. The first scene is usually the last place you work on in revisions, so any decisions you’re struggling with will get ironed out later. Despite what many writers think, the writing process is rarely linear—and often you get more answers once you’ve written “the end.”

Allow yourself the freedom to play around! For now, just pick a place that feels right and go with it. If it’s too soon or too late, you’ve gathered important information about your character’s life which you needed to explore to understand them.

Remember, you don’t need answers right now. Just lay something down on the page and decide later about tweaking it. If you know where your catalyst is going to be scene-wise, imagine starting either multiple scenes before or only one before. See what your brain comes up with. Test the effectiveness of each scene, because you may not need as many as you think you do, or you’ll realize it’s not clear and you do need more scenes.

At the end of the day, the start of your story is a question of effectiveness. As readers, we just want to know who your character is before the plot problem begins, and there are many different ways to show that.

xo,