Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood, opens with the line ‘To begin at the beginning’, and that seems good advice. Beginnings are often good places to start when writing about prose narratives, whether for NEA or exam work.
With NEA work, where you have considerable freedom in your choice of material, the openings of novels and short stories often offer the opportunity to identify significant aspects of your selected texts. This is also the case with texts studied for the exam. Whatever the question, it is likely that the opening of the text will provide useful material to support your answer. Unseen passages are also at times taken from the opening pages of prose texts; familiarity with the different ways that narratives begin can provide valuable practice and experience.
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