About this site
About How to Start a Story
How to Start a Story is a free writing guide from the team that makes Feldar, a writing app for novelists. It covers one hard moment in writing: the first line.
The examples
Classic first lines on this site are quoted from books in the public domain in the United States. Examples marked "Ours" were written by us for this guide.
The first line generator
When you press Write 5 openings, your story idea goes to a small program on Cloudflare's network. A safety model (Meta's Llama Guard 3) checks it, then an open language model (Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.6, or Google's Gemma 4 when busy) writes five openings. We do not store your idea or the openings. We keep a one-day count of requests per network address, stored as a one-way code, to keep the tool free for everyone.
Contact
Questions or corrections: support@feldar.com. Feldar LLC, Delaware, United States.