Starting in the wrong place

Frequently.

And from listening to Writing Excuses, to many writers. I think it was Brandon Sanderson who said he tends to throw out the first two chapters of his first draft because it was the wrong starting place.

I was reading a handbook, https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/my-bad-short-bad-book/ , and decided to write 'a short, bad, book,'. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QAkc-mMavdus6jRLf6gMA0fPA3-6f2Ife0-KISYDmdI/edit?usp=sharing . It has taught me three things. The first one was that I had no idea how to begin a book. The second was that I leave too much out, when writing a story. The third was that I need an editor for grammar and the like. Insofar as starting in the wrong place, you'll get the idea if you read any of it. "Warning!" "Reading this work may cause drowsiness and loss of motor control. Do not operate any vehicle until you are sure how this writing affects you!"
I'm trying to learn how my favorite authors capture my interest, sometimes to the point of total immersion in the story, so that I can make a fantasy adventure novel out of about 100K words that are just a story. { https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y0taS8MjG4n5CMal-FjGxgf3lLnQl6TswaB_9KgWGQI/edit?usp=sharing }

Finding a good place to start a novel or anything seems to take me a long time, and I keep second guessing myself. There are a few theories about where to begin, but the right way depends on the writer, the audience, the plot, and the feeling that the novel is intended to convey. I started looking for online ideas about where to start, but they are all over the place. How do I imagine it as a depiction of pieces of the characters' lives? When I answer that question, I will know exactly where to start.

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/how-to-start-a-novel-right-5-great-tips
https://janefriedman.com/begin-with-action/
https://kobowritinglife.com/2013/08/26/10-winning-ways-to-open-your-novel/

No, I don't have this problem. It's usually more HOW it starts, not when in the timeline. Like let's say my book starts with a guy blowing up a building. It's how that happens that I usually need to think about. Does he sneak into the building? Or does he send a robot in? How he gets the job done is not the important part. The blowing up the building is the important part. The purpose of the scene is still the same.

Yup. I swear I'll have a movie deal on this book and a west end musical before I'm satisfied with the beginning.

For me though, I find there is more going on before chapter one than I'd planned, and chapter one ends up being chapter four.

All my books have a prologue. That’s where I set the tone and hook the reader…usually short and packed with action, introducing the antagonist. Then, in Ch 1, I bring up the protagonist. Now, I gave the reader someone to hate and someone to cheer for. Works for me, that’s all I can say.

Stories starting in the wrong place is one of the top problems that I see agents list as major reasons they reject manuscripts, so I think this is something a lot of people struggle with. For me a lot of it comes from the story changing as I write, so that the original starting point made perfect sense for the first draft but doesn't make sense once some changes are made.

The key for me, both as a writer and reader, is for the story to start with the event that jumpstarts the narrative by changing the MC's circumstances. I don't love it when a story starts with a lot of backstory -- this is an obvious and frequent criticism -- but at the same time I also don't love it when the story starts in the middle and then has to back up to fill you in on why things are happening. It's tricky to find the right balance and so it makes sense that finding it would take a few tries!

What I've heard is, basically, start in the first interesting place with conflict. Your character wants something and she's not getting it for some reason. Give us a reason to care, immediately. Skip the exposition, skip the character introductions, you can do it later. Give the reader a problem they want solved.

That tends to be the kind of thing that hooks me as a reader, and that's where I'm coming from when writing my own stories.

This has happened with almost every book I've written. I tend to start with minor action that provides information about a main character, and I've found I need to start that way just to get my bearings in the story. My real start to the book does tend to be something that shows up in Chapter 2 or 3. So now I've come to assume that my first written chapter isn't really the book's first chapter; it's part and parcel of what Anne Lamott calls the "sh!tty first draft." In fact, I tend to assume that a LOT of my early draft is subject to revision and refinement.

Oh, most definitely. I have a tendency to start too early, so I've had to train myself to get straight to the good stuff as soon as possible.

In my current WIP, I've rewritten the opening scene four or five times now in search of the perfect starting place. Right now, it starts off with a fight scene. I wouldn't want to start every story off like that, but I think it works pretty well in this case.

I view opening as perhaps the hardest part of a story to write. It is so crucial to get those opening pages right in order to hook your audience, and you have so much stuff to juggle (establishing character, voice, setting, goals, etc).

In agreement with the crowd. I think I hit about six or so false starts on my current WIP. Either was too deep into the story or took too long to get anywhere. Once I dissected the core of the plot I found my opener. It's a challenge but sometimes you can salvage those other openers and use them to some extent.

That happens to me all the time, but truthfully, I couldn't have written the real start if I hadn't written the false one first.

No. That has never happened to me. I've always been satisfied with my chapter ones. What I seem to have trouble with is finishing the book, though. I've only finished two of the five novels I've written.

The first time I ever began a book in the right place on the initial draft was my tenth novel. Learning that can take some time.

What's helpful for me is starting the writing process for a new book by writing a chapter that will go either in the middle or at the end of the book. Then I can work backward and ultimately determine what my first chapter should be. I rarely write the first chapter first.

Nope. Despite everybody assuring me that whatever I wrote, chapter 2 is really chapter 1, and many attempts to try it a different way, I think I started at the right place. I don't think the book works as well without the stuff in chapter 1, there's no non-awkward way to put the stuff from chapter 1 somewhere else, and there is action and conflict in chapter 1. No reason to start anywhere else.

This happens to me frequently. With the book I'm working on now, I thought the original story started in chapter 1, but it really started in chapter 3. So I cut the first two chapters. Then, after a while, I came back to it and realized...the book actually starts halfway through chapter 1. So I cut half the chapter.

Eventually, I wrote the first chapter completely from scratch. It's much better now. But that clarity only came from the help of my lovely betas and other friends. I'm hoping this won't happen with book 2!

I never write prologues, so this never happened to me. If there's one thing I'm absolutely certain of, it's the beginning.