Break the blank page with story starters

A strong opening line drops you mid-motion. Someone already wants something, or something's already gone wrong. Skip the weather and the slow warm-up. Start a half-step after the interesting thing began, and raise a question the reader has to keep going to answer. Plain words beat fireworks, so write the line the way you'd say it out loud.

• A locksmith who's never once locked her own door
• The first time I lied to my own reflection
• A summer camp where one cabin is always ten degrees colder
• Two strangers assigned the same seat on a night train

Story sentence starters are the words that get your first line rolling, the two or three before the interesting part shows up. hellowriter's story starter generator hands you the whole opening line instead, so you're never stuck staring at half a sentence. For first person, ask for first-person story starters and every opener comes back in close "I" voice, already inside the moment. A story starter gives you that first line. The story prompt generator hands you a whole scenario to write into, and the story idea generator serves a fuller premise to build from.

Ten to start with, all in close first person:

1. 1.I still haven't told anyone what I found in the attic.
2. 2.I lied to the police, and I would do it again.
3. 3.I have been to this town before, except I have never been to this town before.
4. 4.I was the only one who saw her get on the train.
5. 5.I never believed my mother's story about the fire, until I found the receipt.
6. 6.I have three days to put everything back exactly as it was.
7. 7.I was not supposed to be in the building at all that night.
8. 8.I recognised the handwriting. That's the part I can't explain.
9. 9.I answered the phone and my own voice was on the other end.
10. 10.I have kept the same secret for eleven years and I am about to lose it.

Some openers set a temperature. Creepy story starters make a normal room feel wrong: the babysitter who realizes the kids have been asleep for hours, or the call that turns out to be coming from inside the house. Scary story starters push harder, straight at the thing behind you. Either way the dread does the work, so these stay family-safe with nothing graphic in them. When an opener leaves you wanting the whole thing, the horror story generator writes and illustrates it start to finish.

• The smoke alarm chirps once a night, always at 3:04, and there is no battery in it
• My little sister has started answering questions I only thought
• Every window in the house was locked from the outside
• The photograph is from last summer, but I'm not standing where I remember standing
• The tour guide counted us twice and got a different number each time
• I keep finding wet footprints leading away from a bath I never ran
• The house across the street is for sale again, four weeks after the last family moved in
• He said the woods were safe as long as you didn't answer when they used your name
• My phone autocorrects one word now, always the same word, always wrong
• The lift stops at a floor the building does not have

Picture story starters begin with something you can see instead of a blank prompt. Describe a photo, a drawing, or one frame stuck in your head, and the opening lines come back rooted in that image. A cracked greenhouse at dusk. A single red umbrella in a gray crowd. hellowriter reads the details you give it and starts the story inside the picture, which is where image writing tends to stall: you can see it, but the first sentence won't come. This is also how hellowriter keeps going past the opener, illustrating each chapter as the story grows, so the pictures don't stop at the starter.

The most useful starters are the ones with no genre attached. Something ordinary tilts about ten degrees, and you get to decide whether it tilts back. Take any of these as written, or change the one detail that stops it being yours.

1. 1.The moving van pulled away before anyone thought to check the attic.
2. 2.She had four minutes to decide whether to answer the door.
3. 3.My grandfather left me a key and no idea what it opened.
4. 4.The bus took a turn it had never taken in six years on the same route.
5. 5.Nobody at the party knew who had brought the cake.
6. 6.I found my own name in the lost-property book, dated last Tuesday.
7. 7.The neighbours' dog started waiting outside our door at six every evening.
8. 8.He took the job before he heard what it paid, which should have been the first clue.
9. 9.The apartment came cheap because of what the last tenant left behind.
10. 10.On the third morning the bread was still warm, and nobody had baked it.

Fantasy openers work the same way the genre does: state one impossible thing plainly, as though it were Tuesday, and let the reader do the flinching. The fantasy story generator grows any of these into a full illustrated story if one of them sticks.

• The dragon had slept so long the village built a church on its back
• She sold her shadow in the spring and has been cold ever since
• The map had one blank corner, and the mapmaker would not say why
• Magic left the kingdom on a Tuesday, quietly, the way a guest slips out early
• Every child in the valley is born knowing one word of a language nobody speaks
• The king's new advisor casts no reflection and gives excellent advice
• He inherited a sword that will not be drawn for anything less than a good reason
• The library keeps a book that writes itself one page ahead of the reader
• On her sixteenth birthday the sea returned everything her family had lost
• The last wizard opened a bakery and has been very firm about not doing spells

These are built for a room of thirty: a clear situation, a low bar to start, and nothing a teacher has to screen first. They work as a ten-minute warm-up or a whole lesson, and they leave enough room that no two students hand in the same story.

1. 1.The new kid knew everyone's name before the register was called.
2. 2.Our class pet has started opening the cage door from the inside.
3. 3.The trip bus took a wrong turn and nobody wanted to be the one to say so.
4. 4.I swapped lunches with someone and got something that wasn't food.
5. 5.The oldest tree in the playground has a door in it this week.
6. 6.Our teacher has been replaced by someone identical and much nicer.
7. 7.The lost-property box has one shoe that fits everybody.
8. 8.Somebody keeps rewriting the answers on the board overnight, and they are correct.
9. 9.The library's oldest book is signed by a student who hasn't been born yet.
10. 10.Sports day was cancelled because of something on the field, and nobody will say what.