Classical narrative began at the beginning: establish the world, introduce the characters, build to the inciting incident. This structure works for novels and films where the audience has made a time commitment before consuming a single word or frame. It fails completely in content creation, where the viewer has made no commitment and can scroll away with zero friction.
The solution used by the most engaging creator storytellers is in media res — Latin for "in the middle of things." Your story begins at the moment of maximum tension, maximum consequence, or maximum emotional intensity. The viewer arrives with events already in motion, with stakes already established, with the desire to understand what came before and what happens next doing the work of holding them.
The in media res story hook structure:
Open with the moment of peak stakes: not "I want to tell you about the time I quit my job" but "I was sitting in the car park outside my office at 11:42am on a Tuesday in November, with my resignation letter on the passenger seat, realising I had £1,400 in my account, no job offer, and absolutely no idea if this was the bravest or the most catastrophically stupid decision of my life."
This opening creates questions that the viewer needs the story to answer. How did they get here? What happened next? Did it work out? The desire to resolve these questions is the pull that carries the viewer through the rest of the content.
Notice the specific physical details: the car park, the exact time, the resignation letter on the passenger seat, the specific account balance. Specificity creates vividness. Vividness creates immersion. Immersion creates completion.
Every specific detail in your opening is doing persuasion work. Every vague description is a missed opportunity to create identification and pull.