I've always loved fairy tales. I devoured all the retellings of these stories our library had growing up, and made good use of the interlibrary loan system once it was introduced in the mid-2000s. Even now, you can usually find me with some form of fantastical literature in my hand. While new authors find new ways of introducing their tales, I find that the simple, classic opening lines stick with me the longest. For example:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit..."
"Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very often..."
"That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift..."
What I love about these stories is that they begin with us meeting a character, then learning about their circumstances, and finally hearing about their actions and the consequences that follow. It's easy to draw comparisons to the situation I'm in now; I am a person about to leave my home for a new one (at least for a few years), and we are about to see the first results of these decisions. But I want to take a different tack than this one.
The characters I so love in these books are vivid. They meet us on page 3 of the book (pages 1 and 2 being allotted by the book's editor to title plates and Library of Congress information, more often than not), and already they have motivation, sparkle, and life. Vivid characters have begun their stories long before the reader shows up on page 3. Oh, they may slow down a bit when we first arrive to get us up to speed, but they aren't going to stop for us. When characters yank me into a story like that, I'm instantly enchanted.
Maybe, then, it's no wonder that I want to act like a vivid character right now. I want to pull you in and get you caught up as quickly as possible so we can unravel the rest of the story together. While there is something to be said for a slower beginning (for instance, the elegance of "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day..."), I'm at a stage in my life where I'm less focused on my own prologue than I was in the past. And that's as it should be. Why worry about the meaning of the prologue's events when new adventures are mere paragraphs away?
So if this were page 3 in my story, and you were a new reader, this is how the book would start:
"Once upon a time, I believed that having dreams of my own was wrong. Now I dream incessantly."
Quotes are taken from, in order, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien; The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley; Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine; and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
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