The first rule of opening lines is that they should possess most of the individual elements that make up the story. An opening paragraph should have a distinctive voice, a point of view, a rudimentary plot and some hint of characterisation.
You might be tempted to begin your narrative before the action starts, such as when a character wakes up. Far better to begin at the first moment of something interesting happening, which is more likely to grab the reader‘s interest.
If you feel compelled to begin with dialogue, keep in mind that you’re thrusting your readers into a story in which it’s easy to lose them early on. So keep the dialogue to a minimum.
Sometimes a story evolves so significantly during the writing that an opening line no longer applies to the story that follows. The only way to know this is to reconsider the opening sentence once the final draft is complete.
John Dean
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