Ways to NOT start a story?

About that "dont have a character wakeing up" idea... Hiabane Renmei

One time having your character wake up is acceptable is if something significant and very, very urgent (like an attack) is happening. Use with caution, it's very easy to fumble this.

Well, that's true for In Media Res in general.

I'm not familiar with that particular series, so I can't comment on it; maybe it does "waking up to start the series" well, maybe it doesn't.

Either way, it really doesn't matter.

The point of all of these guidelines isn't "It is absolutely impossible for any good story to begin this way". The point is that these are, in general, often a weak way to begin, and particularly in the more cliche cases should probably be avoided. There's a difference between saying that amnesia is a cliche you should probably try to avoid and saying that anything involving amnesia is automatically terrible and Memento clearly sucks.

The Featureless Blank White Room is a classic example of a bad opening, and the reason most of us haven't seen more than maybe one work beginning that way is that such stories usually never get published. It's a common beginning because it's what the writer sees when they first begin writing: a Featureless Blank White Page. Stories beginning that way often were written straightforward from start to finish with few ideas in mind at the beginning and little revision done, which is why nothing is present at the start. They are more of a joke among editors than readers because they rarely make it to print. Does that mean it's fundamentally impossible to do it well? No - but it's easy to do badly, its presence usually heralds a weak author, and using it is likely to make people turn away at first sight. If you're at the level of writing where you have to ask "How do I not start a work?", it's probably best to avoid that sort of opening until you have more experience.

At any rate, "Ways to NOT start a story?" probably isn't the most useful question to ask. The super-cliche bad openings are easy to avoid, but avoiding them won't guarantee that your opening is actually good; it could easily just be a different kind of bad. The best advice I can really give is that you want to draw your reader in. Most of the things listed in this thread will either bore or confuse the reader in ways that will drive them away; the key is to interest and intrigue them. And there isn't an easy universal answer for how best to do that - it takes talent, creativity, and above all, practice. An hour of writing will improve your writing more than a week of these forums will.

All well said.

Regarding the Featureless Blank White Room: I've seen a half-joking (?) suggestion that it died off as writers started switching to word processors and thus would start their writing by staring at a glowing screen rather than a white sheet of paper.

I think that "word processors facilitates thinking of blank whiteness" idea is actually on this site somewhere.

Hm. I dunno. I started off Innocence Lost with exposition (actually, some of the people here may have seen that opening, which has since been altered to not be excessively boring and verbose), and later regretted it. I think the trick, at least for me and my usually fantastic stories, is to figure out how to start off on something interesting while offering some grounding as to what the hell is going on.

I personally rather liked my prologue for Midas, which begins on a fishing boat with a short but mundane scene of two guys worrying about trying to sell fish on the market while the economy is in the shitter in the good old '40s...

...and then they get possessed by demons, sent to the hospital, go Hulk-mode and apeshit, and start a street-to-street chase/fight scene in alternate history 1948 Seattle with the protagonist superheroes. It seemed very fitting, to go from the innocuous normality of people scraping by in a more interesting past, only to shift into high-energy fantasy action craziness. Of course, I'm still on the first draft, so who knows what'll be by the end...