Beginnings are hard, or so I’ve been told. Not for me, though. I’m good at beginning. I begin too much. My house is littered with half-finished projects and I’m only starting more. My husband is beginning to wonder if the growing mountain of yarn in the home might someday be his living tomb.
That is, beginnings are easy when I know where to begin.
That’s why so many knitting and crochet projects, I think. They begin with a pattern, and the pattern helpfully guides me along to a predictable finish. Beginning is easy with a knitting pattern, and therefore it is all the thrill and none of the struggle. I don’t have to strategize or plan or envision. All I have to know is how to make a slipknot and I’m ready to go. Suddenly a pile of string is infinite possibility. It is a sweater in waiting, a potential afghan, the nascent genesis of socks. I sit down and pick up my needles for the first time and already my future is destined: as G-d is my witness, I will wear this shawl.
I have been writing for my entire life. Truly, I got marked down on an essay in first grade because I made up dialogue for Christopher Columbus and his (imaginary) best friend. I’ve been writing seriously for about twenty years, and during that time I’ve learned a lot about beginnings in writing. And I’ve come to be pretty good at them too.
Beginning a story is also infinite possibility, but the pathway to doing so is less clear. I’m an autistic writer. I like a checklist. I like structure. Novels are messy and the writing life unique to everyone. I don’t like those parts very much.
I’ve found various things that work for me in terms of getting started. Right now, I am sitting virtually with my sternest friend, who will kindly but firmly call me out for getting distracted or chatty. It’s good to have that friend, especially if you have a jumpy squirrel of a brain like I do.
I’ve got my checklist that I’ve developed over the years for beginning a story. It starts with character, because so do most of my stories. I do a deep dive into character development, before moving on to outline and structure. (More on all that in days to come.)
I’ve got a good old-fashioned paper notebook, color-coded pens, and a stack of sticky tabs so I can quickly mark places where things need to go directly into the text, in contrast to brainstorming which is amorphous and must not be seen. (More on that later too.)
These are all great ways to start, and it’s why I have way too many folders in my writing software dedicated to shiny new projects. I want to get the beginnings out of my brain as fast as possible just in case this time, this one is the magical one which becomes Something.
Starting a project like this is less obvious. There are plenty of people out there who will tell you how to start a blog, or build a platform, or whatever the hell the phrase is these days. But the nature of all creativity is that at some point, no matter how you begin nor how precise your template for doing so, you will be left dangling by the thread of your own ingenuity. And with something as amorphous as a writer website, where every single detail is down to my whim, the creativity toll is due immediately.
I don’t know if such a thing could possibly exist as a how-to guide to this sort of project. The nature of it is that it is patterned on the person creating it. I’ve looked, but I haven’t found a catch-all solution.
One of my favorite books of all time is Journal of a Novel, by John Steinbeck. It’s a love letter of sorts, to many things. Primarily and literally, it is a letter to his beloved editor, Pascal Covici, which he wrote concurrently with East of Eden. It is a love letter to his book, which is profoundly relatable. I fall in love with my characters, my stories, and one of the torments of working on a new project is that I’m the only one as excited for it as I am. There’s no fans of something that doesn’t exist yet.
But it’s also a love letter to writing. It’s craft in its purest form. It is a writer sitting down every day and telling one of his best friends what it feels like to write. Sometimes it’s glorious. Sometimes it’s hell. But he is doing it, and he is recording it, day after day after day.
It’s one of the ways I learned to write. One of the best ways. To simply watch it being done. That’s how we learn most things, right? And yet when it comes to writing, the impulse is to leave it opaque. Maybe it’s the mystique. Maybe it’s the imposter syndrome. Maybe we just don’t enjoy being watched. But when it comes to the genuine day-in and day-out rhythm of writing, other than platitudes to the effect of “sometimes it’s hard,” I find it less than satisfying.
I’m not going to do it as well as John Steinbeck. But I’ve got some things cooking, and I figured I might as well see if this kind of process is helpful to anyone except me. I’ll be writing things down as I go and cluing people into the writing process in any way which feels like it might be of use. The hope is that as this project progresses, there will be a body of writing about writing which exists in conjunction with my work as a sort of guidebook to building a writing practice.
Or at least, how I did it.
