Does a story start at the begining? Crafting Chapter 1

Here's a question for all you writers. When you are starting your novel, short story, whatever.....do you start with chapter 1?

I don't. Its far too intimidating try to find that clever opening paragraph (or clever opening sentence for that matter!!) I generally stare at the blank word doc in front of me for a few minutes, hours, days, then snap out of it and flip to writing the part of the story that attracted me to the storyline in the first place...

But eventually, you have to go back to chapter 1 and write it. If you're lucky, you've been inspired and now an opening pitch just comes to you. That never happens to me. So in my research, I stumbled upon agent Nathan Bransford's post about opening with dialogue. Basically, his input was, if its great, compelling opening dialogue then great, it works. However, if its not, it can do a lot to set a negative tone that you can't easily recover from. Plus, if your dialogue is confusing without the explanation of context, then your readers brows are already furrowed. Not a great way to start.

So after reading this + the user comments, the first thing I did was go to chapter one and cross out my first sentence.....back to work!

Because hey, its all about me, right?

Well here goes, a rare delve into self indulgence.

For those of you who know me, you are likely rolling your eyes now. But its true, my other blog is all about the kids and what we do as a family. No commentary. Not because there is nothing interesting that happens to us, again, those of you who know me can assure you that's not true!!! But because I really do hate to talk about myself. It feels so narcissistic.

So for me, this is an exercise in growth, the element of growth being the ability to make public the things that I write. And then of course, try very hard not to alienate everyone I know in the process. That is actually a really tall order.