Rule: Never Start a Story with Dialogue
Why this is a rule:
Readers want to read about conflicts and differences, and that usually happens only after the characters arrive on the page. That’s when the dialogue begins.
There are a lot of pieces of "Never Start" advice -- never start a story with a character alone in the room, never start with the weather*, and so forth. Some of those make sense. After all, readers don’t want the TV weather forecaster’s report.
Why you should bust it:
There are probably as many other experts who suggest starting with dialogue is a good thing. OK, starting a story with dialogue or an empty room or the weather can be asking for trouble if it doesn’t raise questions for the reader, move the story forward or is not germane to the plot. So, Rule Busting time - if it’s relevant and informs the reader, then do it.
Naysayers pronounce when you start with a line of dialogue, it comes out of nowhere, so you run the risk of the reader not caring because they don't know who is saying the line. True, if done badly! But if the dialogue is interesting enough, they will want to find out.
This opens one of my stories . . .
‘Why are we going to Ingerland, Mammy?’
What does the reader glean from this?
The pronunciation of England suggests the speaker is a child, maybe an infant. Who is he/she? Where are they travelling from? Why?
The use of Mammy with an ‘a’ rather than Mummy might suggest Irish pronunciation.
So far, then, we have a mother and infant travelling to England from Ireland. The reader is prompted to find out who they are and why are they making the journey.
And another from a short story . . .
‘You were born a twin,’ she told me, ‘I-I gave away your brother.’
This gives rise to a host of questions.
A mother speaking to her child? How does he/she feel at that moment? Where is the brother? Why did she do it? Given to whom?
I think the rule would be better if rephrased:
Only start with dialogue if it pulls the reader into the story.
In my first example, I believe I achieved that with the use of Ingerland and Mammy.
* If you’re interested in the two best examples of beginning with the weather, take a look at the opening lines of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” Or, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
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