Writing is hard. There are millions of books, essays, blog
posts, letters, diary entries and online rants going into detail about how hard
it is. We’re creating worlds here, taking little squiggles of ink and pixels
and making them into entire living, breathing worlds, and it takes all of our
blood, sweat and tears to make it happen. We’ve got to wrestle with
characterization, dialogue, plotting, timing, interpersonal relationships,
symbolism and any number of things that Literature teachers spend years talking
about.
The biggest
challenge, though, is getting started in the first place.
I’m a
journalist by trade, and if you talk to any one of us long enough you’ll find
out that most of us have a novel we’ve always meant to write. The same is true
of Tumblr and online message boards, where fans come up with a whole host of
fanfiction plots that they swear they’ll write or keep hoping someone will
write for them. Each and every one of
them can always tell you the plot of their unwritten novel or story in
exquisite detail, having spent hours, days or even years of their free time
working it all out in their heads. They’re outlines even the most
planning-obsessed writer would kill for.
And the
tragedy of it all is that most of these stories will never be able to be read,
because none of these people ever seem to write them down.
Getting
that first sentence out of your head and onto the paper can be unspeakably
terrifying. You’ve dragged your fantasy out into reality, and every insecurity
and doubt you’ve ever had comes right along with it. The sentence sits there,
lifeless, completely without the crackle and sparkle the story has in your
dreams, and you want nothing more than to delete it immediately.
But don’t.
Go on to the second sentence instead, then the third, fourth and even the
fifth. Rip the scene out of you word by word and lay it down on the page. Let
the characters you’ve come to know so well laugh and scream and trip all over
the page. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first scene of your story. It doesn’t
even matter if it’s any good. What matters is that it’s there, it’s real and
you can touch it.
If you do
this for long enough, you might get lucky and the words will start pouring out
of you on their own. If that happens let it all pour out of you, not worrying
if you’ve gotten a description wrong or part of the dialogue is terrible or you
don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few minutes. All that matters
right now is getting the words out of you and on to that page.
Later, you
can go back and slap it all into shape. Even the most experienced writers
rewrite and edit their work dozens of times, throwing away whole scenes and
changing characters and redoing the ending when the first one didn’t work.
In the novel I just finished
writing, I literally stumbled my way through an entire third act plot twist
because I knew I needed to get from point A to point B but I had no clue how to
get there. Later, when it was done and I could see the entire story arc laid
out in front of me, I went back and rewrote that whole section exactly the way
it should have been.
The truth is, no one’s first draft
is very good. But if you never write that first draft, you’ll never get to the
second (and the third, fourth, fifth, etc.). And, more importantly, you’ll
never get to that moment when someone reads your story and tells you how
grateful they are that it was out in the world for them to find.
