The first page

 Last week I taught a workshop for Portsmouth Bookfest titled Writing a Sparkling First Page.  The workshop was sold out, and half of the writers there were beginners.

We're all in a sense beginners every time we start a new story.  Where do we begin?  We need to impose some order on our thoughts and ideas and wrestle them into a sensible structure.

One way I find useful for getting my story details together is to use Rudyard Kipling's Six Honest Serving Men as a framework.  This poem comes from his Just So Stories, and the Six Honest Serving Men are What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who.

Answering those six questions gives you a story which hangs together. But, of course, you can't get all of these onto the first page.  But you should get most of them there.

Who refers to your characters.  We expect to meet the main character on the first page, so the first decision to be made is to decide whose story we're telling.  The choice of main character might be dictated by who has agency. A main character needs to be free to act, to do things which affect the course of the story.

When is also something you need to establish right at the start,  If you don't date your work then the reader will assume the story is set in the present day.  So if you're writing historical, add the date.  

Where is also something that needs to be on the first page.  Characters exist in a world, and some description of that world is needed to show the reader where they are.  But on the first page the amount of detail you add needs to be tightly controlled.  Pick out one or two key details which help to move the story along.  You could describe the rustic wooden table your character is sitting at in a cafe, and the scene through the window he sits by, anxiously waiting for someone else to arrive.

What refers to the subject of your story, what problem/challenge or conflict you've given your character.  We need to show some of that in the first page.  That's why so many crime stories start with a dead body on page one.  We know straight away that the book will be a murder investigation.

The two remaining serving men will appear later in your story.  Why refers to your main character's motivation.  Why are they motivated to act in that situation when others wouldn't be?  That's why the  What must be something important to the character personally, to force them out of their comfortable ordinary world and to take action.

Lastly, the How relates to the plot of your story.  How will your character overcome the challenge you set them, or solve the problem?  The How will unfold throughout your story, and should involve tests which the character has to solve or overcome.

Using the Six Honest Serving Men structure ensures you don't leave anything important out of your story. You just then have to write it in an exciting way.