Beginnings -- It's Not How but Where

How to start writing a story is relatively straightforward: you have an idea in your head, pen and paper or a computer screen in front of you, and you sit down and slog away until you have a few pages of matchless prose to show for all your efforts.  How isn't the problem....

It's where to begin which is the real poser.  Which strand of the yarn you have in mind do you knit up first and does it matter if you drop a few stitches along the way? (Probably not.)

If I were telling the story of my life, I definitely wouldn't start at the beginning, which was in an RAF hospital somewhere in the Fens and awfully flat, as Noel Coward observed. I'd cut to the chase and go for drama: some near death experience, perhaps; or first love; or first heartbreak; and I'd use that incident to hook the reader in, for sure, but also to give them an impression of what the story is going to be about; to set the tone, so that they'd know from the first page whether this was likely to be a romance or a thriller, or something elusive and literary.  A good beginning provides a kind of map and compass: this is the terrain and here is the direction we will be travelling in.

Having started with a Big Moment, I would then take care to thread in essential information from the past and interweave this with some key scenes heavy with plot, in order to give some forward momentum to the story.

You could think of it in terms of:

situation + character x drama > plot = great opening sequence

On the other hand, you could picture it as a beautiful old door (another one) weathered and mysterious,  a threshold, full of beckoning possibilities...