Almost everyone gets stuck on the same page, and it is usually the first one.
"How we met" should be easy — you both know the story, you have told it at dinner parties. Writing it down is different, and what comes out is often a version so compressed it could be about anyone: "We met through friends and just clicked."
That sentence is true and completely unusable. Here is how to get past it.
Start with the room, not the feeling
The instinct is to open with what it meant. "I knew straight away." It reads flat because it tells the reader a conclusion without giving them anything to picture.
Start with where you were standing.
- Where were you, specifically? Not "a party" — whose flat, which pub, what floor.
- What time of day? What was the weather doing?
- Who else was there?
- What were you wearing, or what were they?
- What were you supposed to be doing instead?
That last one is often the most useful. Most people meet while doing something else — working a shift, waiting for a friend, sheltering from rain. The unrelated reason you were both there is usually the most interesting fact in the story.
The first specific detail is the whole page
You need one concrete thing to anchor the scene. Once you have it, the page usually writes itself.
Compare:
We met at a party through mutual friends and got talking.
with:
You were in the kitchen arguing about whether tomatoes belong in a fry-up, and I stayed for the argument.
The second is not better written — it is more specific. It gives an illustrator a kitchen, a posture, an expression. It gives a reader something to see.
You do not need to be a good writer to do this. You need to remember one true detail and write it down plainly.
Write it as three beats
A how-we-met page is usually three things:
- Before. What you were each doing there, separately.
- The moment. The specific thing that made it a story — a conversation, a mistake, an intervention by a friend.
- After. What changed. Not "we fell in love" — the small thing. Who texted first, how long it took, what the excuse was.
Three sentences, one per beat, gets you a usable page. Everything after that is polish.
What to leave out
The full timeline. How you met is not the same as how you got together, and cramming both onto one page makes both worse. If there were six weeks between meeting and anything happening, that is its own page.
Everyone else's names. A cast of five friends is confusing to any reader who was not there. Keep the one whose presence actually mattered.
The version you tell at parties. It is optimised for a laugh in thirty seconds, so it tends to skip the quiet detail that makes it feel real on a page.
Retrofitted significance. "Little did we know." You did not know. Saying so adds nothing.
If you genuinely do not remember
Common, and not a problem — especially for people who met gradually, through work or a shared group, with no single moment.
Two options that work:
- Write the first time you noticed instead. Not the first meeting, but the first time you thought about them when they were not there. That is often the better story anyway.
- Write the disagreement about it. If you each remember it differently, that is a page. Two versions of the same afternoon, drawn side by side, is more interesting than one agreed account.
Inside jokes
If the how-we-met story contains one, include the origin rather than the punchline.
The phrase you both say is not funny to anyone else, including the illustrator. The afternoon it came from is drawable, and it carries the feeling. The joke still lands for the one reader who matters — they will recognise it immediately.
A note on tone
Write it the way you would say it out loud. Books that read like a wedding speech tend to feel performed; books that read like one person talking to another feel like a gift.
If you are stuck on a sentence, say it aloud and write down what you actually said.
What to do next
Give yourself ten minutes and a notes app. Answer the questions in the first section — where, when, weather, who else, what you were meant to be doing — without trying to make it good. Then pick the most specific answer and start there.
When you have it, start your book, or read the complete guide for structuring the rest.
FAQ
What if I am a bad writer?
It matters less than you think. You answer prompts in a chat rather than composing prose, and specific answers beat eloquent ones. "He burnt the rice on the first date" is more useful than a well-turned sentence about love.
How long should the how-we-met page be?
A few sentences. Three beats — before, the moment, what changed — is usually enough. One page should carry one moment, not a whole timeline.
What if we met online?
Same method. Where were you sitting, what were you supposed to be doing, what was the first message that was actually good. The specifics are different, not scarcer.
What if we disagree about what happened?
Use both versions. Two accounts of the same afternoon make a better page than one agreed-on version, and it is truer to how couples actually remember things.
Should I include the difficult parts of the story?
Not on this page — but somewhere, usually yes. A book of nothing but good news reads flat. See the complete guide for where those pages belong.