Picture the scene: You’re back at school, in English class. Your teacher hands out sheets of paper and pens, writes ‘Le Grande Romance!’ on the board, and tells you, ‘There is the title. Now write me a story. You have one hour. Begin!’

Perhaps you sit for a few minutes pondering the theme, playing with ideas. Perhaps you jot down some notes. But eventually (unless you want to incur the wrath of your teacher!) you stop doodling and gazing about and you begin to write. But where exactly in the story do you start?

‘Why, at the beginning!’ I hear you say. ‘Where else?’

Of course. When we learn to write, we write in order – start, middle, end. In fact, our school teaching rather programmes us to write in this way. So as we grow into adult writers, we may assume, to borrow from Punch, ‘That’s the way you do it!’

It’s one way, certainly. Burning Embers, my debut novel, opens with a young woman, Coral, aboard a ship returning home. The idea came when I was gazing out to sea from my French home one evening, daydreaming as I watched a ship drift across toward St Tropez, and the scene that formed in my mind became Chapter 1 of the book.

But starting at the start is not the only way to create a story. Take Stephenie Meyer, for example, author of the bestselling Twilight series. An idea came to her in a dream:

It was two people in kind of a little circular meadow with really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy and one was just a girl who was human and normal, and they were having this conversation. The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I’d be dreaming about vampires, and he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how much he wanted to kill her. It really captured my imagination. (Source)

When she woke up, she put pen to paper, and wrote the first words of Twilight. The first words, but not the first words sequentially. That dream became Chapter 13 of Twilight. So, Meyer began in the middle, and the narrative grew either side from there, with that scene at its heart.

Other authors skip both the beginning and the middle, and start, conversely, at the end. Unlike Stephenie Meyer when she wrote Twilight, Nicholas Sparks is a very experienced writer – he’s sold more than eighty million books worldwide, and eight of his novels have been brought to life by Hollywood. So he no doubt feels quite comfortable in his writing process – and is undaunted by working backwards. He told Writing magazine (May 2014) that for his novel The Longest Ride:

I knew exactly how I wanted the story to end, including the specifics. I knew how I wanted the readers to feel as they finished the novel, and from there I proceeded to work backwards. Little by little, the story grew…

I took a similar approach when writing The Echoes of Love: I knew the ending, and then I had to trace back and work out what brought the characters to that point. I did so in the planning stages, though, because my logical mind demands that I write in a linear fashion!

What do you think about the start point of a story?

When you write, do you need to commence at the beginning? Does dotting about a story inspire you or confuse you? Can you write backwards?

When you read, do you feel you can sense where the story began, that in the author’s point of origin – whether Chapter 1 on the ship of Burning Embers, or Chapter 13 in the meadow of Twilight, or the very final chapter of The Longest Ride – beats the very heart of the book?

I would love to hear your thoughts.