Matthew Dicks teaches fifth grade. He's been doing it for 27 years. On the first day of school every year, he teaches his ten-year-olds one specific thing about storytelling before anything else. Start your story with location and action. Meaning: where are you and what are you doing?1 Two questions. The first sentence has to answer both. Where are you? What are you doing? That's the rule. Everything else can come later.
The reason this rule is taught first is that it's the rule that signals to the brain that a story is being told. That signals to the brain that a story is being told. Those five chemicals get released immediately. But even more importantly, if I tell you "I open the door to my son's bedroom," you can already picture it in your mind's eye.2 The location-and-action opening is doing two things at once: it activates the listener's story-comprehension architecture (which Dicks attributes to evolutionary cognitive design3), and it triggers the listener's mental imagery (the audience already has a son's-bedroom-door image in their head from their own experience).
The combined effect is dramatic. Audiences who were not yet listening start listening. The room quiets. The phones go down. Working storytellers report this happening reliably enough that they treat it as a load-bearing technique for capturing rooms in the first sentence. The women, the marginalized people who I work with, they always report to me that if they start their story with location and action, it actually makes people stop talking. And it's because the brain is triggered. The brain says, "Oh, a story is being told. It might keep us alive."4
The principle has three properties:
1. Location and action, both, in the first sentence. Not just location (which produces a static scene-setting opening — It was a dark and stormy night). Not just action (which produces an unmoored event opening — I started running). Both, together, in one sentence. I open the door to my son's bedroom and I can't believe what I see inside. Location: son's bedroom doorway. Action: opening the door. Both present. Both contributing to the brain-signal.
2. The action is forward-moving, not static. I'm standing in front of the conference room door is location-and-action technically, but the action is standing, which doesn't move forward. I push open the door to the conference room is forward-moving action — the audience's attention follows the motion. Audiences want stories to be going. They don't want to be taught things. They don't want to have preambles and exposition. They want to see the story begin.5 The forward-motion of the opening action is what makes the audience feel the story has begun.
3. The location is specific enough to image but generic enough to fill in. I open the door to my son's bedroom names a specific location-type (bedroom) but leaves the visual filling-in to the audience. The audience has a son's-bedroom-door image from their own life, or from cultural memory, or from a thousand TV shows. They use that image, not Matt's. This is what Dicks calls leveraging audience imagination — and the location-and-action opening is its first deployment. Naming the location-type triggers the audience to supply the location-image. Specifying the location too precisely (I open the white-painted door with the chipped corner to my son's east-facing bedroom) prevents the audience from imaging because they're being given the storyteller's image instead of supplying their own.
The mechanism is cognitive activation of the story-recognition module. Human brains have a specialized cognitive architecture for processing narrative content. For almost all of human existence, we couldn't write anything down. So for almost all of human existence, the only way we transferred information from one generation to the next was through oral storytelling, which is why our brains have evolved to respond so positively to a story.6 [POPULAR SOURCE — evolutionary-storytelling claim] The architecture has trigger-conditions: it activates when input matches the narrative-signal pattern. Location-and-action is the cleanest narrative-signal pattern available in a single sentence.
Either alone doesn't activate the architecture. Pure location-naming ("It was 1985") triggers context-processing, not narrative-processing. Pure action-naming ("I ran toward him") triggers event-processing, but the listener has nowhere to place the event. Both together — location and action together — match the narrative-signal pattern and produce the architectural activation.
What happens during the activation: the listener's brain shifts from general-attention mode to story-tracking mode. This is a different cognitive state with measurable behavioral signatures: the listener leans slightly forward, their eye-saccade rate decreases, their breath rate slows, and they begin tracking the speaker rather than monitoring the room. The shift happens within a single sentence and is mostly involuntary — the listener doesn't decide to enter story-tracking mode; their cognitive architecture enters it automatically when the trigger-conditions are met.
This is also why the technique works particularly well for marginalized speakers whose audiences are not granting attention by default. Dicks: The women, the marginalized people who I work with, they always report to me that if they start their story with location and action, it actually makes people stop talking.7 The technique bypasses the social-attention-granting layer (which may not favor the speaker) by triggering the underlying cognitive architecture (which works the same for all speakers). The story-recognition module doesn't care about the speaker's identity; it cares about the input pattern. Location-and-action openings force the activation regardless of social conditions.
Start-with-location-and-action is the first-sentence-level operational form of the broader Big-Three beginnings discipline. Fight for beginnings motivates the time-allocation; beginning as opposite of ending motivates the architectural shape; start with location and action motivates the specific sentence-form the opening must take.
The principle works as the delivery vehicle for elephant stakes. Location-and-action is the form; the elephant stake is the content delivered inside that form. I open the door to my son's bedroom (location-action) + and I can't believe what I see inside (elephant stake) = full opening sentence.
The principle is the first sentence application of the cinematographer metaphor — the narrow-lens opening is necessarily location-and-action because that's what makes a narrow-lens shot intelligible. I open the door is narrow because the audience sees only the door; the action (open) is what makes the narrow shot move.
The principle prevents the plane-ride failure specifically by ruling out the over-teaching opening. I'm a fifth grade teacher is not location-and-action; it's self-identification. The over-teaching opening is precisely what location-and-action prevents.
Dicks's actual spoon-of-power opening illustrates the principle in working form:
I'm standing behind my school where I teach. I'm a fifth grade teacher. I'm standing in front of this enormous pile of fall leaves and they're quivering. There's a little boy inside the leaves and his hand emerges and he's got a metal object in his hand.8
Sentence-by-sentence:
Notice the engineering: the first sentence does location-and-action and nothing else. The teaching content is added in sentence two. The expansion of location and the introduction of character happen in sentences three and four. The opening is layered — each sentence adds one thing — rather than dumped — where everything is delivered at once.
Now compare to the lesser-teller version: I'm a fifth grade teacher. I'm working at a school in Connecticut. It's called Wolcott school. I teach about 23 kids per year.9 Same total information delivered, different sequence. The lesser-teller leads with self-identification (teaching content), then location-naming (school, location), then schedule detail, then class size. The location-and-action principle is violated for four consecutive sentences. The story-recognition module never activates. The audience disengages.
Same storyteller, same story, two different openings. The location-and-action discipline is the structural difference between the working opening and the failing opening.
Saturday afternoon. You have a draft. You're going to apply the first-sentence test.
Read your first sentence aloud. Now answer two specific questions:
If you can answer both from your first sentence alone, the sentence passes. If you can't answer either — or if you can only answer one — the sentence fails.
Most amateur first sentences fail. Common failure modes:
Now rewrite. For each failure, find the moment the story actually begins (the first physical action in a specific place) and start there. My grandmother always said → I'm standing in my grandmother's kitchen and she's holding a wooden spoon over a pot of soup. Looking back, I realize → I'm walking through the parking lot at the Greyhound station with a duffel bag over my shoulder. It was 1985 → I'm sitting on the couch in my parents' living room watching the news with the volume down. Three years ago, my wife and I decided → My wife is sitting across the kitchen table from me with the spreadsheet open between us.
Each rewrite obeys location-and-action. The teaching content (1985, three years ago, grandmother saying things) can be delivered later, in the body of the piece, after the audience has committed.
Test the rewritten opening against the 30-second test (see beginnings as where stories die). If a stranger listening for 30 seconds would want sentence 31, the opening works. If not, refine further.
This workflow takes 20-30 minutes per piece. Most beginners discover their first sentences need substantial rewriting. Most working storytellers report that even after years of practice, they still occasionally draft first sentences that fail the location-and-action test, and they routinely rewrite them in revision.
Your first sentence is a self-description. I'm someone who has always struggled with — that's self-identification, not story-opening. Rewrite to a specific moment in time and place.
Your first sentence is temporal context. It was the summer of 1992 — that's context, not opening. Rewrite to the protagonist in a place doing something.
Your first sentence is a thesis statement. What I learned that summer is that family is more complicated than I thought — that's a TED-talk opening, not a story-opening. The story should arrive at this realization, not announce it.
Your action is mental rather than physical. I realized that... / I thought about... / I remembered... — these are mental actions. They don't trigger the story-recognition module. Use physical action: I'm walking through the park / I'm reaching for the door handle / I'm sitting on the edge of the bed.
Your location is generic-without-image. In a small town / A long time ago / Somewhere in the city — these are non-imageable locations. The audience can't supply mental imagery for them. Use specific location-types that audiences have images for: kitchen / parking lot / high school hallway / grandmother's bedroom.
You over-describe the location instead of naming it. I'm in a small white-painted kitchen with a yellowed linoleum floor and a refrigerator humming in the corner — too much. Just I'm in the kitchen and let the audience supply the rest. Specification kills the imagination-leverage.
The location-and-action principle is named explicitly in both Dicks transcripts and treated as foundational across his teaching practice.10 He explicitly attributes the discipline to his 27 years of teaching fifth-grade storytelling, suggesting the principle has been operationally tested with the most attention-challenging audience there is (10-year-olds).
A real tension exists with Macfarlane's relational nature-writing which often opens with sustained observational stillness rather than location-and-action. The genre-convention differs. Macfarlane is writing long-form for self-selected readers; Dicks is delivering oral pieces to non-self-selected audiences. The conventions are calibrated for different conditions.
A subtler tension exists with Karlsson's discovery-writing: Karlsson's essays sometimes open with abstract questions or observations rather than location-and-action. The same principle that's load-bearing for oral can be optional for essay form. Open question whether Karlsson-style essays would benefit from location-and-action openings or whether their form genuinely tolerates abstract openings.
Open question: how does the principle interact with framing-narration (Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness, etc.)? Stories that open with a frame-narrator setting up the actual story face a structural problem — the frame-narrator's opening is necessarily meta-content, not story-content. Whether the location-and-action principle applies to the frame-opening, the embedded-story opening, or both, is structurally interesting.
Open question: do very short forms (140-character stories, social-media micro-posts) follow the principle? The space may be too constrained to deliver location-and-action plus elephant stake plus everything else. Alternative opening-strategies may be needed for ultra-short forms.
Dicks and Gelb converge cleanly on location-and-action discipline. Gelb's cold-open-then-credits hook architecture for documentary depends on the cold open placing the viewer in a specific location with specific action happening. Same principle, different medium. Both crafts treat the first moment as load-bearing because the audience-commitment decision happens immediately.
Dicks and Karlsson diverge. Karlsson's five-step method doesn't prescribe location-and-action for essay openings — Karlsson's openings can be abstract, philosophical, observational. The split reflects medium-specificity rather than disagreement about the technique's mechanism. Both writers recognize the cognitive mechanism; they apply it differently because their forms differ.
Dicks and Bilton converge at scale-relative discipline. Bilton's narrative non-fiction openings often include location-and-action embedded within the lead (the first paragraph). Same principle applied within the longer-form opening unit. The principle scales fractally across forms.
Start-with-location-and-action is fundamentally a cognitive-architecture-trigger — a sentence-pattern that reliably activates the listener's narrative-processing module. That mechanism has direct analogues across disciplines.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray (Hughes) — Hughes's elicitation work uses physical-anchoring in opening conversation: the elicitor opens with a specific reference to a place or activity that grounds the target's attention in concrete context rather than letting it drift through abstract opening pleasantries. The mechanism is structurally parallel: location-and-action grounding triggers cognitive-engagement architecture that abstract opening doesn't trigger. What neither domain produces alone: Dicks teaches the storyteller to use location-and-action for audience-commitment installation; Hughes teaches the elicitor to use physical-anchoring for target-disclosure pacing. The cross-orientation parallel reveals that concrete-context-anchoring at the opening is a meta-skill across live-craft disciplines with different intents. The cognitive mechanism (concrete context activates engagement architecture better than abstract context) is the same regardless of orientation.
Eastern spirituality: The Five Sandhis — Junctures — Sanskrit dramaturgical theory's first juncture (Arambha — beginning) is explicitly characterized by establishing the deshakala (location-and-time) and the upakshepa (initial action). The first juncture's structural requirements include exactly what Dicks calls location-and-action, articulated in classical Sanskrit dramaturgy at least 1,500 years before contemporary storytelling craft. What neither domain produces alone: Sanskrit theory supplies the philosophical depth and the multi-part articulation of the opening juncture; Dicks supplies the practitioner-grade compression (just location and action in one sentence). The cross-tradition convergence is striking: classical Sanskrit dramaturgy and contemporary oral storytelling independently identify the same opening-discipline as load-bearing. Working storytellers can borrow the classical articulation to understand why the discipline works (it satisfies multiple opening-juncture requirements simultaneously); classical aestheticians can borrow Dicks's compression to make the principle teachable to non-specialists.
Behavioral mechanics: BOM Entrainment 13-element compliance ladder — BOM tradition includes opening-grounding moves (physical-environment-naming, current-moment-anchoring) as essential elements of compliance work. The mechanism overlaps with location-and-action: concrete present-moment grounding triggers cognitive states that abstract opening doesn't. The cross-orientation handshake shows: opening grounding is a feature of professional live-craft across orientations. Practitioners across cooperative-storytelling (Dicks), adversarial-elicitation (Hughes), and influence-engineering (BOM) all discover the same opening-discipline because the underlying audience-cognition is the same.
The Sharpest Implication The location-and-action principle implies that most public communication violates the simplest possible cognitive-engagement rule. The rule fits in two questions: where, doing what. Most amateur openings — speeches, presentations, articles, stories — fail to answer either question in the first sentence. The fix requires no special creative talent. It requires only rewriting one sentence to place the protagonist somewhere doing something. The misallocation is structural: most communicators are not aware the rule exists, and the rule is so simple that once you know it, you cannot un-notice its violation in others' work. The principle, once internalized, makes it impossible to listen to most public speaking without diagnosing why the audience disengaged in the first sentence.
Generative Questions