The new year is a good time to think about beginnings, or openings to our stories.
I wrote about openings in a post last year. Among many possibilities for starting a story, I wrote about beginning with the main character's name.
"My name is Elizabeth but no one's ever called me that." That's the first line of How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff.
"Hello. I am Ivan. I am a gorilla." The Newbery Award winning novel, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, begins with Ivan introducing himself.
Then there's the famous opening to Moby Dick by Herman Melville: "Call me Ishmael."
Can you think of other novels or stories that open with the main character telling us his or her name?
Meg Rosoff's opening is intriguing because we learn the main character's name--Elizabeth--but there's also a mystery. How does Elizabeth prefer to be called, and why? (I'll let you read the novel to find out!)
Take one of your ideas for a story, or a story you're working on, and try out this kind of "introduction" opening.
Your main character, whether a girl, boy, gorilla, or sailor on a whaling ship, may reveal something you didn't know.
