Hello Mr Gaiman. I am in year 11, so I've got my English GCSEs coming up, and my only issue is that I have no idea how to start a story. I can write the rest of the story perfectly fine, but I can never figure out how to start it off well. Do you have any advice?

It's ok if you don't respond, but if you do, thank you.

Try to start it in an interesting way that makes people want to go on. A way that, perhaps, asks a question that you need to keep reading to answer, or that will mean something else if you come to it after finishing the story.

Sometimes I write the beginning of the story, the opening lines, last of all.

It can be a fun exercise to just sit and write for yourself first lines of stories that are interesting and make people want to keep reading. They don't have to be any good, and you definitely don't need to know what happens next.

'Everything would have been fine if the Pope had not misplaced the antique silk alms bag containing her birth control pills.'

'The day Julius's mother died was, by no coincidence, the same day that Julius discovered his Jack Russell terrier secretly spoke Italian.'

'The old house squatted on the hill like a toad on the edge of a well, and, like a toad, would occasionally, when unobserved, lumber down from the hill in search of food. It was not choosy. It would eat anything."

Try it. It's fun.

"it's sinning sunday hoez"