Once upon a time? - 5 inspired Ways to Start your Story

Stories are a wonderful tool for speakers, marketers, sellers, anyone who wants to communicate.

Stories are especially powerful if we need to influence, to lead, to establish ourselves as credible, an authority, the person to hire, to trust, to follow.

We know that, you and I.

And possibly the most potent part of that power is the beginning of the story.

The first line. The first sentence.

The start.

This is where we draw our audiences, our readers, our listeners into the story – establish the story trance with its power to take them with us, unresisting, and thoroughly engaged.

And for so many speakers, marketers, content creators, that potency is lessened or lost, mostly because they never realised the power they had there.

Maybe they gave it no thought, no preparation.

Maybe they followed in the footsteps of the latest superstar/formulaic manipulator.

Maybe they just didn’t know.

And it is difficult, even knowing that powerful potential,

maybe because we know how important it can be, to know how, where to start.

Before I give you five ways you can start your story, let me say that this is not where you start writing or creating the story, necessarily.

You need to plot out the story – use a storyboard if you need to. Plot it, then, according to the need you have for the story – the point you are making, the flow of the whole speech, piece of content, presentation.

At that point it may become apparent that you have a beginning for your story –

it may be the middle, a flashback, or the beginning chronologically, but it must align with the purpose and flow of the story.

The beginning should introduce a new world – the world you are taking your audience into.

It should do 2 of three things

1. establish your voice – introduce the tone of your writing/speaking

These are the first words of the novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabakov

“Lolita, light of my life; fire of my loins, my sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta, the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo.lee.ta.”

2. introduce the character

Elizabeth Gilbert at the start of her TED talk, “Success, failure and the drive to keep creating” began,

“So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads”

3. The conflict/story thesis

Sylvia Plath from “The Bell Jar”

“It was a queer sultry summer, summer they electrocuted Rosenberg and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”.

Amy Mullins in her TED talk “The opportunity in adversity”

“I’d like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I’m writing anything,but I’d already finished editing the piece,and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word “disabled” to see what I’d find.”

You will notice that they are introducing,

allowing a peek,

stimulating the appetite for more,

rather than giving large amounts of information.

Ok, here are

Five ways you can start your story

just five of the multitude of possibilities

that can stimulate your creativity, open up some options for you to consider.

1. Action

Make it small.

From Elizabeth Garver’s book “The Body Shop”

“My mother had me sort the eyes”

2. Description

From Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”

“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.”

3. Flashback

Anand Giridharadas’ TED Talk “A tale of Two Americas and the mini-mart where they collided.”

He begins, “Where are you from?” said the pale, tattooed man,

the beginning of a story of a shocking attack at a Texas mini-mart that shattered the lives of two men: the victim and the attacker, that leads into a parable about the two paths an American life can take, and a powerful call for reconciliation.