Getting started is always the hard bit. I sit there with my Outline, a blank sheet of paper and a pen, and try to make the story appear on the paper. There are few things more intimidating than a blank piece of paper I have to fill with something halfway coherent.
And that first sentence is so important. I need to start the story to get rid of the sea of whiteness but I also need to make that first sentence a good one. While any part of a story including the first line can be rewritten in the edits it's still important to at least get the idea of a hook into that first line. I usually make three or four false starts with any story before I actually manage to start writing.
Once I have ink on paper and the first paragraph or two written it gets easier and writing speeds up. But I have another problem with first drafts - I'm painfully aware how badly I'm writing. I once asked a friend why my first drafts were so bad they made me cringe. She said 'because they're first drafts'. Another friend expressed the same sentiment last night when I was bewailing how badly I was writing to them. They're right of course. With a few exceptions all writers write terrible first drafts - and the ones who don't are rarer than the ones who think they don't. Elegance and flow comes in the rewrite - hopefully anyway.
The reason I mention all this is because I've been battling to start "The Opening" since Sunday and it's taken until today to really get started. I finally have the first two to three hundred words written. I haven't counted them but I know roughly how many words I write in the space I've filled. It's a slow start but should pick up momentum over the next few days and with the bank holiday weekend ahead I'm hoping I can get the first draft written and typed in by the end of May and start on the Outlines I want to have done by the end of June. The sooner it's written the sooner it can be left to brew before I embark on the rewrite.
So there's a brief summary of where my writing projects stand as of today. :-)
About Me
- Becka
- Becka Sutton is a self-described crazy cat lady, but she’s not very good at it: While she is crazy she only has one cat. She was born in Britain in 1972 and has lived there her entire life. In her early teens she started scrawling fantasy stories in exercise books her mother bought her to stop her scribbling in her school books. She hasn’t stopped writing since, and she credits writing as the outlet that allowed her to recover from the nervous breakdown she had after her parents died. Her other interests include reading, listening to music, attempting to draw, growing her own vegetables and looking after the aforementioned cat, Pumpkin. No, you can’t read the novel she scrawled as a teen – she burned it long ago because it was awful. You can read more of her work at http://firebird-fiction.com
