Start Right Before You Get Eaten by the Bear
Open your story one beat before the juicy part — everything earlier is backstory scope creep.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 95%
A concrete editing rule for openings. Storytellers instinctively start at the chronological beginning — the preparation, the logistics, the drive — when the audience only cares about the moment of tension. The rule is to locate the single juicy moment, then start just enough before it to give the reader footing, and delete everything upstream of that point.
Origin
Wes Kao's framework, named after a camping story: the bear is the payload, the trip to REI is not.
Core principles
- 01Backstory is scope creep — it expands to fill whatever space you allow it.
- 02The audience needs orientation, not chronology.
- 03The right amount of context is the minimum that makes the juicy part land.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the bear
Find the single moment of tension, surprise or stakes in what you're about to tell — the thing that made the story worth telling at all.
Pro tip If you can't find a bear, the story probably shouldn't be told.
- 2
Back up exactly one beat
Set your opening a small amount of context before the bear — just enough that the reader understands who is where and why it matters.
Watch out Backing up two beats reopens the door to the whole chronology.
- 3
Delete everything upstream
Cut the shopping trip, the booking friction, the gas station stop — all the setup that preceded the tension. Nobody cares about it.
Pro tip Do this as a dedicated cut pass after the draft is complete, not while drafting.
In the wild
The instinct is to open with going to REI to buy a Patagonia jacket, then booking the campsite, then the website having difficulties, then stopping at the gas station on the drive over. The bear-rule version opens right before a friend leaves a Cliff bar out in their tent and the group nearly gets mauled.
→ The story starts at the tension instead of the logistics, and the audience stays with it.
Common mistakes
Chronological openings
Starting at the beginning of the timeline rather than the beginning of the interest. Chronology is how you remember the story, not how the audience wants to receive it.
Confusing context with credibility
Writers pile on setup to prove they were really there. The credibility comes from the specificity of the bear moment, not the length of the run-up.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone writing posts, talks, pitches or Slack messages that keep losing readers in the first paragraph
Not ideal for
Formats where the process itself is the value (post-mortems, technical walkthroughs, legal narratives) and the sequence has to be complete
From the transcript
“I call start right before you get eaten by the bear and the idea is that if you're telling a story about camping”
“start right before you get eaten by the bear is cut out all that backstory scope creep”
From the episode
Persuasive communication and managing up
Wes Kao (Maven, Seth Godin, Section4)