Define your story

The Opening is the very first scene the protagonist lives - the one moment in the entire Experience that's written exactly the way you wrote it, word for word, every single time. Everything after that is a living conversation between the reader's actions and your world's rules.

A strong Opening does one job: it puts the reader somewhere specific, gives them a reason to care, and stops just before they'd expect an explanation. Trust the reader to want to know what happens next - don't explain the world to them, let them discover it.

Everything you build afterward - World, Rules, Moments, Endings - exists to make that first scene worth living all the way through.