The best place to start your story

Roman poet Horace in his “Ars Poetica” (“The Art of Poetry”) says of Homer and the Iliad:

Nec gemino bellum Trojanum orditur ab ovo
Semper ad eventum festinat, et in medias res

Nor from the Double Egg, the tale to mar, traces the story of the Trojan War
Still hurrying to th’ event, at once he brings his hearer to the heart and soul of things

Taken from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9175/pg9175-images.html on May 19, 2020.

Homer doesn’t start his Trojan War epic “from the Double egg”—one of the twin eggs from which Helen of Troy hatched after her mother Leda was ravished by Zeus who had taken the form of a swan. Homer brings us “to the heart and soul of things,” the final year of a ten-year siege of Troy.

One imagines Homer embarking on his epic: “Where should I start?… It was a ten-year war… Year one, I suppose… But why did the war start?… Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, stole Helen from Menelaus, King of Sparta… But how come Paris would do such a thing?… Of course, because the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite were fighting over who was the fairest, and asked Paris to judge for them. He chose Aphrodite, who rewarded him with Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened to be married to Menelaus already… But who was this Helen? Where did she come from?… Of course, she was born from an egg.”

Rather, Homer begins when Greek leader Agamemnon, forced to return female captive Chryseis to her Trojan priest father, takes Greek hero Achilles’s female captive Briseis instead, and Achilles says, “You know what Greek comrades? I’m sitting this war out”—which by a chain of events leads to Achilles’s beloved male friend Patroclus impersonating Achilles by wearing his armor. That’s much more exciting than a theoretical Season 1 Episode 1 of the Iliad entitled “The Egg” (opening narration: “The egg was round and white, and had a sort of dull patina…”)

Start at the latest exciting event possible, and drop in any exposition on your characters as you go along.