The Most Important Words in Your Story

You've heard about the importance of first impressions. Yeah, true in writing, too.

Story beginnings should be spunky. Amazing facts can do the trick. Clever can work. Engaging is imperative. Yet writers often craft opening sentences poorly, starting with boring filler words—and too many of them—as part of indirect, passive, bloated sentence structure that lacks spunk. 

As an example, this would have been a boring way to start this article:

There are a lot of stories that start with…

Nine words, and only two of them (stories and start) has anything to do with this story! The rest are sloppy padding. They can all be cut or pushed back and minimized by simply reorganizing the sentence to be active and direct. Compare the nine-word example to the first six words at the actual beginning of this article, at least four of which are either core to the message I want you to glean or are interesting all by themselves.

How many of the first words should adhere to this notion? There’s no exact answer. Writing advice is always about best practices, logic melding with creativity, experience with trial-and-error. There are no rules. But here’s my advice: 

Stuff as many useful words up front as you can.

Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

My first draft of this article started even more directly:

Avoid writing opening sentences that…

Pretty strong first four words, eh? But it felt a little preachy for a beginning, so I opted for the less didactic but arguably more compelling start.

The lesson is simple: