With a Generalization
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
Felipe Alfau, Chromos
With a Character
He was lifting his knees high and putting his hand up, when I first saw him, as if crossing the road through that stringing rain, he were breaking through the bead curtain of a Pernambuco bar. I knew he was going to stop me.
V.S. Pritchett, The Sailor
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Ha Jin, Waiting
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry
With Narrative Summary
Today, a man called from Long Beach. He left a long message on the answering machine, mumbling and shouting, talking fast and slow, swearing and threatening to call the police, to have you arrested.
Today is the longest day of the year – but anymore, every day is.
The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread.
The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing.
Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
The Jackman’s marriage had been adulterous and violent, but in its last days they became a couple again, as they might have if one of them were slowly dying.
Andre Dubus, The Winter Father
With Dialogue
“Don’t think about a cow,” Matt Brinkley said.
I’m afraid Walter Cronkite has had it, says Mom.
Jayne Anne Phillips, Home
—Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
William Gaddis, J.R.

With a Setting
After dinner, with its eight courses and endless conversation, Olga Mikhailovna, whose husband’s birthday was being celebrated, went out into the garden. The obligation to smile and talk continuously, the stupidity of the servants, the clatter of dishes, the long intervals between courses, and the corset she had put on to conceal her pregnancy from her guests, had wearied her to the point of exhaustion.
Anton Chekhov, The Birthday Party
With a Reminiscent Narrator
I was already formally engaged, as we used to say, to the girl I was going to marry.
Peter Taylor, The Old Forest
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster, City of Glass
With a Child Narrator
I don’t have much work to do around the house like some girls.
Toni Cade Bambara, Raymond’s Run
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of
Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By Establishing a Point of View
First Person
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
There was no exchange of bodily fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine.
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Modern Love
I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants – and cripples, especially cripples.
Stanley Elkin, A Poetics for Bullies

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Third Person
The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—
Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups
With a Brief, Dramatic Statement
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Mother died today.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
They shoot the white girl first.
Toni Morrison, Paradise
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road
With a Description
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson, Neuromancer
With a Question
Where now? Who now? When now?
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
***
ASSIGNMENT: Experiment with various ways to begin your chapter by writing nine different types of
introductions. Use the examples from this handout to help you get started. Some of the introductions will be one sentence while others will be closer to a paragraph or two, but upon completion, you should have around one single-spaced page. Be sure to label each type of introduction and have some fun, please.