How to Start a Story

Breaking down the opening scenes of The Arsonists' City and Lady Bird.

November is here. And though National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has apparently collapsed in scandal, I am nevertheless digging into a new novel project. My dual-timeline-tennis-epic is returning to her shelf for now. I love her. I’ll pick her up again.

I’m so excited about this new idea. It’s everything I love to write about: scavenger hunts, the Pacific Northwest, families. Fine, I admit it’s basically the Goonies, but… of course it is. It will be my Goonies.

Lindsey Peters Berg (the original inspiration for this newsletter blog thing) constantly writes about how obsessed she is with her own novel. It’s generated in me an intense jealousy, but also encouragement: I get to write whatever I want. I get to write the book only I can write, and the one I want to read. That book’s in Seattle, it’s full of puzzles, movie references, and multi-generational explorations of legacy, class, and myth.

So I’m trying something different this week: a book report of sorts. There are a few authors and books that I treat as writing textbook, and whenever I’m stuck, I return to these tomes:

• Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See

• Hala Alyan: The Arsonists’ City

• Maggie O’Farrell: Hamnet

• Maggie Shipstead: Great Circle

• J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone¹

All of these authors have vivid prose. I turn to Doerr and O’Farrell to bathe in their words. Alyan and Shipstead also have gorgeous prose, but I love their books for structure: multi-timeline epics handled with craft.

I’m going to walk through how I close read, and re-read, a story’s first chapters.

Enticing prologues without bait-and-switch

The Arsonists’ City

All too often these days, a TV show opens with a dead body. Woah! How’d that get there?! they want you to wonder. And then a title card: X days/weeks/months before… and we settle into the story the writers actually wanted to tell once they’ve “hooked” you.

A book’s prologue poorly done does the same, teasing the book’s most exciting section so the reader will be patient in the first few chapters. It’s how I can usually tell a book will suck (I’m a huge snob about prose, not my best trait, but here we are). Like, if you put the movie’s best scene in the trailer, how good is your movie really?

Not the case with Hala Alyan’s prologue in The Arsonist’s City. It begins:

Tonight the man will die. In some ways, the city already seems resigned to it, the Beirut dusk uncharacteristically flat, cloudy, a peculiar staleness rippling through the trees like wind. It’s easy to costume the earth for grief, and tonight the birds perched upon the tangled electricity wires look like mourners in their black and white feathers, staring down at the concrete refugee camps without song.

In fewer than one hundred words, we learn:

• Someone’s about to die (she still gets to do a fun hook!)

• Beirut will be a significant place in this story.

• The story occurs in a somewhat modern time (electricity wires).

• The story is set during a time of crisis for Beirut (refugee camps).

Immediately after this excerpt we meet Zakaria, the man who will die. As we’re brought into his home and his inner life, the detail is rich and so lushly laid out that the expository information slips by nearly unseen.

Here’s Zakaria in his memories:

He thinks of the house across the city, the one where his mother has worked as a housekeeper for twenty years, the one he spent countless afternoons playing in as a boy with the son of the owner, the courtyard they’d transform into a battlefield, an ocean of sharks, lava. Idris was his first friend, his closest friend…

… When he was alone in the courtyard, it became his; he was the ruler of this inexplicable, beautiful place, a house with four bedrooms, bathtub faucets the shape of swans’ necks.

Idris’ family and his house are central figures in this novel. By the end of the second (!) page of this story, we already have a sense of Idris’ family’s status. We get a sense of the romance in how people think about this house (swan neck faucets), and a class tension is hinted at in the boys’ friendship.

As the prologue progresses, we learn Idris and Zakaria have recently fallen out because of a girl: Mazna. We meet Mazna — another major figure in this novel — through Zakaria’s besotted gaze, and we learn an anecdote that will be pivotal later. And then we witness Zakaria die (not a spoiler, for those planning to read this book! It’s literally on page xii).

Zakaria returns later in the story, but this is the only time we get to be in his mind. Alyan packs so much into a few pages: Zakaria loved Idris, and he loved Mazna, though he was not from their world. He was a good person. We meet three of the novel’s main characters as well as the main setting, Beirut. Alyan also establishes the novel’s major themes (class, war, exile, and family) and gets to flex some serious prose swagger.

That’s how you do a prologue.

How to meet the family efficiently

It’s hard to paint a family in a story. There’s so much to tell; what do you include? What do you leave out? Who do you introduce, and when?

When done well, ooooh it’s so good. Filet mignon good. But often, you end up reading mystery meat.

Lady Bird

Two women rule my writing life — Taylor Swift and Greta Gerwig — and nobody can write a scene the way Gerwig does. I reworked the whole premise of this post in order to talk about Lady Bird and this scene:

Lady Bird and her mother are driving home from a college tour. You meet them in the car listening to the end of The Grapes of Wrath audiobook. Both women are brimming with tears, in their own worlds with the story, so that before you hear almost any dialogue you are struck by how similar they are. Gerwig needs you to know this for her story to land.

Lady Bird ejects the audiobook tape and puts it in one of those cassette storage cases. So we know the story takes place somewhere between like, 1985 - 2009. Then Ladybird says, “Our college trip took twenty-one hours and five minutes,” which gives you her rough age as well as the reason for their road trip.

Much like Alyan’s prologue, the first minute of this movie tells you everything it will be about: mother-daughter relationships and coming of age. The film also has a prologue quote from Joan Didion about Sacramento, and boom! There’s the third major theme.

Their peaceful drive is short-lived. Soon after:

LADY BIRD: I wish I could live through something.

MARION: Aren’t you?

LADY BIRD: Nope. The only exciting thing about 2002 is that it’s a palindrome.

MARION: Ok fine, yours is the worst life of all, you win.

[they begin to shout over each other]

LADY BIRD: Oh so now you’re mad? Because I wanted to listen to music?

MARION: It’s just that you’re being ridiculous, you have a great life.

LADY BIRD: I’m sorry I’m not perfect.

MARION: Nobody is asking you to be perfect! Just considerate would do.

Their argument grows until they’re having every argument they’ve ever had, and through their fights, and still the first three minutes of the film, Gerwig cleverly gives you everything you need to know. Lady Bird is restless in Sacramento. She can be romantic and dramatic, while Marion is all practicality. The family is tight for money, and her father’s job is at risk. Lady Bird hates the school her family made her go to, meanwhile Marion doesn’t think her daughter has a work ethic.

The scene ends with Lady Bird jumping from the moving vehicle. Brilliant.

The Arsonists’ City

After the prologue, the first chapter of this book is titled “Park Slope Wives” and this is where we meet Ava. The first page tidily introduce us to her and her husband, Nate. In one brief paragraph we learn they have a kid, the sex is boring and less frequent, and the couple are likely quasi-wealthy Millennials (Ava has fantasies about her spin class instructor).

Then the good stuff begins: another mother-daughter conversation.

This novel has a lot of work to do: Alyan tells this story from Ava’s perspective, as well as that of her parents, Idris and Mazna, and her two siblings’. That’s a lot of primary characters to juggle in fewer than five hundred pages, and Alyan’s deft work early on is why I keep revisiting it to learn.

Ava picks up her mother’s call mere moments after sex with her husband (a hint at the sway her mother possesses). Before she accepts the video call, Ava smoothes her bangs, and we learn a little more: there’s a layer of formality between them.

Before the call begins, Ava observes her mother via FaceTime: she notices the phone stand her brother purchased for her aging parents (a brother!). She sees her father in the background, and we learn he’s recently returned to Beirut because her grandfather passed. We learn Ava has another younger sibling, Naj, who lives in Beirut.

Then Alyan writes some Gerwig-worthy dialogue:

“Ava, we have news.”

Ava sighs. Her mother was a thespian in her youth and her voice still commands. Speaking in English, Mazna dwindles a little; her musical accent whispery over the years. But speaking in Arabic, Mazna is a woman accustomed to being listened to.

“What is it?”

“Hi, Avey.” Her father’s head briefly emerges above the fridge.

"“Some big news,” her mother clarifies. “Another one of your father’s reckless, impulsive plans. I wish you children didn’t have to be involved.”

We now know:

• Mazna has a flair for the dramatic

• Mazna has authority in this family

• The family is bilingual

• Idris is affectionate (he uses a term of endearment), and he can be impulsive

In the following pages, we get so much more: Alyan weaves in the novel’s inciting incident while we learn more about Ava’s world, and her siblings, Mimi and Naj, who have full chapters of their own. Every major character is mentioned in the first chapter, but it never feels like an expository dump.

Bringing this into my own work

I’m in first draft mode, so I have to resist over-polishing my opening pages at the expense of advancing the story. But I want to follow Alyan and Gerwig’s examples. The first paragraphs and pages should tell you who, and what, a story will be about.

For example, in an early pass I tried to introduce the full family of characters in a single paragraph. I was going for a tableau, like a camera panning across a room of people. But it didn’t feel right, and I updated it after re-reading the opening of The Arsonists’ City. Now each of the main characters enter the scene on their own. You still meet them all in the first five hundred words, but you learn more about each on their own terms.

3,000 words down. Approximately 80,000 to go, and then years of revision, ~assuming~ I still like this thing by then.

I think I will.

2025 has been a solid writing year, though not exactly the one I wanted. I got a second short story published (woo!), but progress on my other pieces languished. One short story is dragging its heels toward perfection, while another amazing one — it’s speculative, it’s modern, I love it — grows mildew in my drawer at like 90% complete. I started the year with grand plans of leaving 2025 with a first draft of tennis-epic. That won’t happen. I’ve learned a lot, but I haven’t written enough words. This blog-zine project cannibalized a lot of my time, but it’s also getting me to the keyboard every week. It’s still fun, and still worth it, and I’m going to keep going.

About career and identity, or another Mary Kate and Ashley deep dive? Perhaps another manifesto against your beloved “numbers” and “facts”? Stick around to find out.

---

A weekly change of pace

Etymology is one of my favorite topics to force upon others. Find me at parties cornering someone while I yell “DID YOU KNOW THAT PENINSULA MEANS “ALMOST ISLAND”? IT’S ALMOST AN ISLAND!”

Please enjoy my two favorite etymological stories:

• The reason English has so many words for meat and cattle comes from 11th century England, when the French invaded. The peasants spoke German while the nobility spoke French. So cow comes from the Germanic Kuh, but beef comes from French boeuf. Similarly, sheep came from Schaf, while the elite ate mutton (mouton).

• Left-handed bias lives in our language. Words like gauche and sinister derive from old words for the left (gauche is French, sinister is Latin), while right has always meant correct and morally good, and dexterous comes from the old Latin word for right. Adroit, to be clever and skillful, also comes from the French word for right (droit).

1. I despise J.K. Rowling for continuing to be such an unmitigated transphobe, so it’s complicated to talk about these books. I love them in a way I’ve not found in other books, and I’ve used them to grow as a writer. I don’t want to elevate Rowling, but I want to be honest about the books and stories that move me? I welcome thoughtful ideas on how to deal with this.