When I think about the way to begin a story, I lift up the best hook in the whole wide world, crafted by E.B. White...

"Where's Papa going with that ax?"

But as I mentioned a few years ago, did you know Mr. White had to work through several versions of openings before he landed?

Here are his alternate openings...

1. A barn can have a horse in it, and a barn can have a cow in it, and a barn can have hens scratching in the chaff and swallows flying in and out through the door -- but if a barn hasn't got a pig in it, it is hardly worth talking about. I am very Glad to say that Mr. Zuckerman's barn had a pig in it, and therefore I feel free to talk about it as much as I want to. The pig's name was Wilbur. 

2. I shall speak first of Wilbur. 
Wilbur was a small beautiful, nicely behaved symmetrical pig living in a manure pile in the cellar of a barn. He was what farmers call a spring pig -- which simply means that he was born in springtime. But there is no use talking about Wilbur until we have looked into the matter of the barn itself. The barn was very large. It was very old. 

3. At midnight, John Arable pulled his boots on, lit a lantern, and walked out to the hog house. The sky was clear, the earth smelled of springtime. Inside the hog house, the sow lay on her side; her eyes were closed. Huddled in a corner stood the newborn pigs, eleven of them. They had their heads together, in a circle, like football players before a play. 


I have to remind myself (often) that an opening is the pop of a gun when a race begins.  The reader doesn't have to know what time the runner woke up, or what he had for breakfast, or what the weather was like.  The reader wants the immediate sense that the race is beginning. We're taught not to be "blurt-ers" when we talk to people, but in writing beginnings, that's almost what it is.  E.B. White blurted, in a sense, launching the story with a big, concerning question.  


Here's the beloved author and his wife, Katharine along with their dachshund, Minnie.