Replacements for Once Upon a Time

As a suggestion, you may like to try being more descriptive &/or specific to the time you're referring to. It is more informative, adds depth & a sense of reality. Some examples could include: In a time when people lived simply & simply lived... In long-forgotten times when Kings ruled fairly, brave knights fought nobly & beautiful princesses married handsome princes... Many years before recorded history, in a time which many have forgotten, arduous quests turned boys into men, men into heroes & heroes into legends... Thus, the line becomes less important than the journey you are taking the reader on.

Gee! I haven't thought of this as I have grown up reading tales that start with "one upon a time" and reading this phrase again brings me back to my childhood memories. Well, I like one of the suggestions posted here where it was used in the story "shrek"... "in a far far away land..." as this give every child the excitement of exploring a magical land of long time ago.

what about 'in a land far far away' (that sort of sounds like Shrek though lol or somewhere in the deep, dark jungles or high in the mountains, that sort of thing.

i love this phrase, it adds imagination at the very beginning of the story! It causes a kid to vividly imagine what's going to happen next, a princess, a monster, a prince? You can get away with alot with your youngster but not with a publisher. A publisher wants a great beginning or setting that really punches the heck out of the reader's eyes. I hope this helps. You really need good adjectives to get the stories going good!

Here I would give you the first lines written by famous novelists: 1) There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. - C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) 2) He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) 3) It was the day my grandmother exploded. - Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992) 4) I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) 5) A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) 6) In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) I hope this would help you to write your new story.

Over here it's customary to start a story with "in the times when wise men / wizards/ fairies were alive", or with "a long, long time ago, even before my great-grandmother was born". I used to love that when I was a child, because my great-grandmother was still alive, and she seemed ancient to me, so before her time was magical. There's also "before time begun", which sounds interesting, I think. Good luck with your stories, I think it's something very nice to do, I still read children's stories every now and then.

Dear friend, I could lots of it provided, if you accept them,- Long long time ago, Here come the, The being begins with, Now the time has come.., Lets begin, so on goes.