Writers are told all the time that agents, publishers and readers often judge a story’s worth on the opening paragraphs. This piles on the pressure to make sure the beginning of our novel is the best it can be. Many writers focus on this first and foremost, but I would encourage any writer not to dwell on the beginning because it will hold back progress, and the beginning is highly likely to change anyway.
Fiction
I focused for some time on the beginning of my current project, wondering whether to start the story later or earlier, which led to problems with point of view. I got so bogged down by the beginning that I made no progress whatsoever. When I realised what was happening, I decided to worry about it later.
Non-fiction
This works for non-fiction, too. When I wrote my PhD dissertation, the second-last chapter I wrote was the conclusion; I wrote the first chapter – the introduction – last. That was because I needed to write the rest of the thesis to know exactly what it was that I was introducing, and what my conclusions were.
Had I written the introduction first, there would have been little correlation between what I was introducing and what I actually wrote about, partly because my understanding of what I was doing improved over time and partly because results and ideas steered a different course to the original plan. Furthermore, introductions in academic work generally summarise the conclusions made; I had to have written the conclusion in order to know what I would conclude.
The first draft
The first draft, as Ernest Hemingway is widely reported to have said1, is going to be bad. The point of the first draft is to get the story out of our heads and onto the page or screen. The second draft is when you go through it and mark all the bits that work and don’t work, shuffle the scenes and chapters into a more coherent order, worry about the beginning2.