Tips for Writing a Good Beginning

Usually, writers struggle the most with the beginning and the ending. Here we will discuss how to write a good beginning.
Please mind that no matter we, young writers, are often unacknowledged, we may still have some good pieces of advice to give. Here's what I've learned from my ten years writing experience (although I'm still very young, I've been indeed writing for ten years):

The beginning should often hook the readers. Imagine a person standing at the bookshop, not knowing what to buy, they will of course take a random book and look at its beginning. Even at a first glance they should get hooked, in order to continue reading. This is why the beginning is so important.

The first tip would be - always review the beginning, even if you haven't finished writing it. When you write down all of your thoughts and once stop to recollect some others and continue writing, I would suggest reviewing what you already have written. It helps to continue writing suitably for the previous text, and also to see if the beginning is really proper.

Remember, proper beginning will hook even the writer themselves, so if you read your beginning, and at the very first glance get hooked, your beginning is mostly the right one. Take a look at this classic:

"Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is the copy of the drawing".

Maybe you recognized the first chapter's first lines of "The Little Prince", written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He's one of my favourite writers, and The Little Prince is one of my favourite books.

As you've noticed, from the very first lines it gets the readers hooked. We get interested in who the child is (obviously, we think the child is talking), and how will the story continue. Maybe this child is so interested in forests and animals, that we will see him having a profession related to them? And the picture gets us hooked too, drawn so cutely, that we immediately think: "If I want to have fun, this is the right book to read".

Now let's take a look at another book:

"I wish to state quite definitely that it is by no means out of any wish to bring my own personality into the foreground that I preface with a few words about myself and my own affairs this report on the life of the departed Adrian Leverkühn".

Some of you may have recognized Thomas Mann's great masterpiece, "Doctor Faustus". Now look at these amazing lines! It's written with a great magnificence, and makes us think that "the departed Adrian Leverkühn", as the author calls him, must be a magnificent person himself. And he looks quite important, as the narrator is writing a biography about him, so, definitely, this book immediately gets us hooked, we wish to know who is Adrian Leverkühn, and why is he so respected by the narrator.

So, regarding our two discussed first lines, the second tip would be: always look at how other, preferably famous writers write their beginnings, and learn from them as much as you can. 

We learned a lot from these first lines of great Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Thomas Mann, the classical authors who already left their footsteps in human history. Of course every writer wants to be the next to leave their footsteps in human history, so why not learn from the ones who already did it? 

Now let's see one of my own first lines and discuss the third tip:

"On the slopes of far off mountains, which are covered with snow in winter and where green grass waves in summer, the shepherds who graze snowy-white gentle sheep, once had an interesting legend".

These are first lines from my book, "The Herdsman of Wolves". Of course these lines aren't as amazing as the previous ones, and I don't have a pretention that they must be, because previous lines belong to classical authors, and these lines belong to a casual writer. But these lines, no matter how they look, still get us hooked. Why shouldn't we get interested in what legend the story is going to narrate about? And what's more, it's a legend of highlands, which is very, very interesting! So why shouldn't we try this book? This is the first thought that comes up in mind. 

The third tip will be: Don't give out much information in the beginning, but give out as much to make readers interested. 

How to do this? Simple way is this: Think of your story, and then take a very important line to start with, and write it down. Review it. Didn't get you interested? Edit it. It got you interested? Continue writing. Then cease writing, go, do other stuff, until you nearly forget what you wrote. Then come back, look at your writing, and see - does it get you hooked again? If it does, then yes, it is the right one. 

The bad first lines would be these:

"Gena was walking to school when she saw a boy, named Mike, approaching her, telling her how nice she looked".

Warning: This beginning doesn't belong to any book, I made it up.

The reader will immediately guess that these lines belong to a young writer, and the main thing for young writers is - never make your readers guess your age! 

What's bad about this beginning? First, reader wants to get hooked, and we can't hook them by telling them how nice our character looks. It just seems very shallow. We can simply adorn this sentence with some wonderful words to grow its beauty, that hooks readers more. And remember, never give out all of your characters' names in the first place! Let them appear by the time as your story continues.

So the nicer first lines would be:

Gena was walking to school when she saw a young student approaching her, and immediately paying attention on her appearance, astoundedly expressing how beautiful it was".

Warning: These first lines are as well made up, as the previous lines.

These lines sure look more poetic, and what's more, they're emotionally written, not just a bunch of beautiful words together. So the fourth tip would be: when you're writing, make sure you're filled up with emotions (listening to music helps a lot). It sure will get the reader more hooked than the previous lines, because when words are written emotionally, they make readers emotional too, and readers love being emotional when reading a book, it's one of the most wonderful feelings when reading.

These tips have helped you? Then why not to try and write a beginning yourself? You can write it down directly in the comments, if you would like to! 

WARNING: I'm Georgian, so my English may not be too good for a writer. Although I have C2 fluency, I still make a bit of little mistakes. I know some native speakers who often edit my books, but they wouldn't edit my blog, so it may contain some little mistakes you don't wish to see. Briefly, if anything is wrong, I apologise. :)