I think the requirements for the ideal first 13 depends on the type of story you intend to write, and a lot of the advice we give each other on this web site can be misleading, especially from a beginner’s perspective.

I’m going to borrow from a recent post Christine made to explain this.

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MICE:
Millieu: When telling a story that is more about a millieu (place, setting, time travel can be a millieu as well) you begin when the main character goes to the new place and end when he returns. Example: Gulliver's Travels.
Idea: When telling a story that's main point is the eventual revelation of an idea (as in a mystery story) you begin with the question and end with the answer.
Character: When a character change is the central element, you begin with the character realizing they need a change (Note: this is NOT necessarily when their problems begin) and end when they change or accept what is.
Event: When an event is the central focus of a story (epic fantasy, more often than not) you start when something goes wrong with the world and end when its fixed (or the world ends)

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It can get hard, dealing with advice that’s only based on the first 13.

Another thing Christine posted. Sorry Christine, you’re the one that started me thinking. This is from a post in the writing class thread, advice found in Nancy Kress’ book on beginnings, middles, and ends.

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Pull out a story of yours that has at least the first few scenes completed. Write five different opening scenes for the story, each no more than three to six paragraphs, focusin on:
1. The description of some object of importance to the scene.
2. Your point-of-view character engaged in some specific, unexpected action.
3. An outrageous opinion held by the point-of-view character, expressed inside her head or in her own words -- something she would never tell a living soul (everyone has these).
4. Six lines of dialogue between two character (three lines each) who are arguing about something that will be important to the plot.
5. A description of the room where the first scene occurs. Focus on details that will have thematic significance and/or that tell us something about the owner's personality.

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I know this is a large topic, and we don’t want to write essays here. Just thought I’d throw it out there to see what I’d get back.

So, back to the original question. What, in your opinion, would you consider the necessary elements of the ideal first 13? I expect some essentials exist that apply to all story types, and to all approaches at writing the beginning.

The MICE thing I have used to determine where the story starts.

Don't worry about the first thirteen lines for themselves, but check out the responses. At first, I was feeling pretty good about it. Suggestions about where sentences should go and what paragraph to begin with aside, it basically seemed to work. There was something there, at least. And then later on I find two people who just hated it. That's their choice, but the point is that I couldn't see this as a failed opening even after two people spoke out against it.

YOU CAN NEVER PLEASE EVERYONE

Now, that said, you probably want to please *someone* and preferably quite a few people. So when I provide suggestions for good hooks (and these are a sample, I expect to see many more), I would not expect any of these to hook everyone present.

GOOD HOOKS:

1. SYMPATHY: Something that creates emotional sympathy like a character dealing death, divorce, abuse, etc. can get a lot of readers hooked. If you start with a sentence like: "Nothing was the same after my daughter died." you've got me for at least a couple of paragraphs while you explain or develop. There are other things we can sympathize with as ell, of course. Death is just always poignant and will get a lot of people. But a divorce can work too, for example. Some people won't sympathize because of preconceived notions about divorce and the rest will be looking for an additional reason to sympathize to keep them going, but it can work for starters.

2. CONCERN: If we are afraid that a character will die or otherwise come to harm, you may be able to hook us. "When Mike looked into his assailant's eyes, he saw death staring back at him." This has to be followed up with something that justifies it, but you've got me hooked. Mike might die. I don't even have to know who Mike is. Since it's his POV he's sentient and afraid of death (or he would have mentioned it) and I can relate to that.

3. WEIRDNESS: "The ten-headed Blarg of Proxima 9 hated when those human explorers walked into its mouths and got stuck in its throat." Ok...maybe someone else can come up with something better for weirdness, but theoretically you want the reader to say, "What?" but in a good way...this is different from "Huh?"

4. CONFLICT: This is a big one. If you start us right into conflict, whether verbal or physical, you've got a lot of people hooked. It doesn't even have to be huge vioence, it can be everyday fights.

In my current novella, I flat out state two things: That my character is a ghost; and second that he's ultimately looking for the man who killed him so that my character can haunt him and torment him. If that isn't enough to draw a reader in part way before I bore them silly, then I've really got reconsider this writing thing.... or read more stories so I can learn.

Which is my recommendation... read everything you can for as many hours per day as possible. Study the openings and find out what makes them work for you, the reader. This is where the secret to good openings will be found, in my most humblest opinion.

my favorite way for a story to hook me is to start it with the character explaining the story he is about to tell.

if you can squeeze foreshadow into your first thirteen i will love you to death!

if your very first sentence is foreshadow... well, i'll proceed to grovel before your feet.

The thing about foreshadowing is that it has to be subtle; and so starting a story with it is almost by definition not subtle.

What I started with, I think, is an outrageous opinion held by the main character. "No one suspects the blind guy." While it does get you to ask, "Of what? What did this guy do?" it is more a tease than a foreshadow...the difference being a pretty fine line, I admit. Then the narrator gets cocky. The other thing this opening does is show you right away that the protagonist is blind, which almost always generates sympathy.

Christine's word choice was definitely better, it is more of a "tease." i guess i confuse them sometimes.

as for telling me what the story is i didn't mean it so literally, what i meant was to hint at it, basically another form of the above, teasing.

i suppose you are right, it could be difficult to do in 3rd, but it could work, especially in 3rd omni, but third omni isn't easy to do even when you don't try pulling a stunt like that.

The one that I usually comment on is establishement of the POV. Until the reader has an idea of the perspective from which the story is told, it is difficult to start putting things into context.

Another point I occasionally make is establishment of scene. This doesn't have to give me the entire milieu (though a scene that narrows down the milieu a bit helps), it just has to establish the physical location for that scene. This is probably more important than POV, the reason that I comment on it less often is because more writers seem to have problems establishing POV in a timely manner than have difficulty remembering to set the scene.

Far and away the most important, even if I rarely mention it, is competence with the English language. If the simple wordcraft of assembling meaningful sentances made of actual English vocabulary is clearly beyond the abilities of the author, I will almost never comment. Further, it isn't likely that anyone could establish scene or POV without mastering the basics of language. It is usually when the language is understandable but not particularly clear or well constructed that I will have something to say on the subject. Really excellent prose can keep me reading without much concern over the establishment of POV or even scene, at least for the first 13. That level of prose is rare, and most who achieve it don't neglect POV and scene, so for that level of prose I'm willing to suspend my desire to see something established for a while in the confidence that the writer does know something about writing.

There are a number of ancillary considerations that can come in once I'm confident that the 13 lines communicate some of the author's intent. I would place the "hook" of a story among these, since if I can tell that a story is going in an interesting direction, that means the writing was good enough to give me that information. "Sympathy" and so forth are also quite dependent on the author doing a good job of using those 13 lines to give me something understandable.

"Don't use an obvious hook."

In fact, my audition piece to boot camp became the show piece for how to break this advice.

The thing is, obvious hooks feel artificial and editors know that. They are looking for something else, and perhaps Survivor has said it best with his POV, scene, competence triangle. That's not to say that my previous post is useless. In fact, conflict, sympathy, etc., can all be by-products of this triangle. You do have to start at the right spot and it has to be interesting and engaging. It does not have to say "WOW!" and truthfully, the tendency around here to look for that "WOW!" is putting artifical constraints on our openings.

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Coming at it another way, what I want to do in the first 13 is provide
* a hook
* assurance to the reader I'll do a good job, which largely involves being clear, showing sensory detail, and having a clear POV.

The MICE thing I have used to determine where the story starts.

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Do I dare suggest another concept? How about Voice? It's different from point of view, but related. I've heard voice described as that elusive quality that editors can't define, but they know it when they see it, and they look for it.

The most obvious is the way that different characters speak in dialogue. It is a critical part of the art of dialogue that the exact words and idioms that your characters use to express themselves reveal aspects of their personalities beyond what they are currently trying to say. The much maligned practice of giving a character a heavy accent is at one end of the scale, at the other we have things like when (or how often) a character chooses to speak and how directly the dialogue addresses the point being discussed. A character that talks around something by saying that it is just "going to let the air in" is telling us volumes about himself. Whether you need to master this kind of voice depends on whether you're stories use dialogue, but most modern fiction goes in for it.

Then there is POV voice. All narratives have a POV of some sort, so you can't get away from this one. In many senses, it functions much the way that the voices of characters in dialogue work. But there are some important differences. Most POV's have constraints on things like how much they can "talk around" the subject before the reader really gets angry. Similarly, accent and heavy idiom used in POV narration are far more noticible and intrusive than in dialogue, partly because of the sheer volume of text that will be affected. While the full range of options for giving the POV a unique voice still exists, the costs of using the outlying tactics tends to concentrate most POV voice work on word choice and diction.

Then you have your own voice as a writer. Your natural, native vocabulary, the phrases and diction that you as an individual use comfortably to express your thoughts. You can affect a false one, though this is probably a bad idea. For some stories (perhaps most), you'll use your natural voice as your POV narrator's voice. Over time, as you learn new vocabulary and develop personal perspectives on the common themes we use language to explore, your own voice evolves and changes, though probably certain elements are rooted more in personality than knowledge.

Of these, it is easiest to craft the voice of character dialogue. You just need to figure out how your characters would talk. POV voice is more difficult, you need to understand how a character thinks (or, if the account is first person, how the character writes--which is to say, how the character thinks, then edits those thoughts for the page). Finally, you have your own voice. Probably, this voice encompasses the range of what you're capable of doing with dialogue and POV voices, and building it is not something you do for each story, it's more or less an extension of yourself like your arms and legs.

Ever get the feeling that you have to quell your natural vocabulary and sentence structure for a story?

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For some stories (perhaps most), you'll use your natural voice as your POV narrator's voice.

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That’s a tricky one. I’ve been critiquing the work of a person on another site who received comments from editors saying that her suspense novel reads like “woman’s fiction.” Her author’s voice could easily be adapted to the romance genre, but I don’t think she’s interested in that. Wants to learn exactly what it is about her writing that gives the impression so she can change it.

The conversation is interesting. It hits on sentence structure and gender bias regarding characterization. Too much to get into here in a short post.

When I look at the first 13 I want to feel confident that the author is aware of the complex relationships involved with voice. I think this is something that indicates that a writer is aware of the finer points involved in the craft.

I would suspect that it is more the concerns and themes that she is exploring in her work that gives that impression. Her voice shouldn't be able to convey that information by itself. But I couldn't tell without reading some of it.

On a more general note, I think that authorial bias is a separate issue from voice, though there are similarities in terms of craft. With both, you want to learn to recognize them in your own work. And you don't want to try to suppress or eliminate either. What you need to do with your own biases is to acknowledge them and understand how they will seem to the audience. Just because a suspense author has a bias towards concentrating on how the story affects the relationships of her female characters, that doesn't mean that I'll consider her a poor author, as long as she makes the right moves to persuade me that I should care about that too, rather than just assuming I already do. If she were writing "woman's fiction", then that assumption would be justified, but when writing suspense it is not.

Card has a lot of very noticible authorial biases. But he can use his voice to write effectively from many different points of view, which has (rather unfortunately for him) led to him having a lot of fans who hate and detest him personally. This isn't because he does anything to hide his biases, it's just that he knows how to write for people that may not share them. Often his personal position on some issue isn't really pertinant to the way it's being used in one of his stories.