I keep realizing, forgetting, and re-realizing that the first step to any writing project is forcing yourself to start.
I love writing, but even after more than a decade of doing it for both work and fun, I still have to drag myself to the page or screen & force my hands to move at first. I’m not sure why – maybe because writing is an industrious hobby and I default to leisure when left otherwise unemployed. Maybe because the acts of creation and production so impress me that to begin either of them myself on any scale feels, for a moment at least, like a grand undertaking, the beginning of a long journey. Maybe because my perfectionist outlook tends toward the nitpicky at times, and so commencing a thing grates a bit when there is always so much more that I could do to prepare first.
Regardless, the end result is that there’s this weird little dip in my writing process, which usually goes something like this:
This process also applies to chart writing, apparently. Pretty meta, right?
First, I’ll get an idea for something I want to write – say, for example, a story where a cynical college student finds a magic spell book and accidentally sends herself to Hell, which she finds is run much like any other city by a human king her own age who rose to power primarily through elaborate bluff and con artistry. Hey, that’s pretty interesting! Like Alice in Wonderland meets The Wizard of Oz meets Dante’s Inferno. I could run with that.
So I run with that. I flesh out new facets of this idea in the most inconvenient times and places, like in the shower, or lying in bed at 3 am on the verge of finally falling asleep. I hastily scribble out explanations and deeper connections in the margins of my notebook, or email them to myself as semi-coherent text messages if my phone is handy but my notebook is not. Maybe the seven deadly sins play a defining role in this particular version of Hell’s culture? Of course they do! Make ’em, like, competing houses of aristocracy or something. And of course the demonic citizens are all going to be exaggerated facets of the human condition taken to their logical extremes to showcase how a well-rounded human being is simply a conglomerate of every vice and evil all rolled together into a tenuously balanced ball that should be expressed in moderation. That goes without saying – probably don’t even have to write that one down, it’s so obvious I’ll remember it later, back to sleep…
This is the funnest part for a bit.
If I’m lucky, there’s still enough electricity kicking around after all the brainstorming that I can launch write into the thing and knock out a few pages from sheer momentum. If I’m really lucky, those few pages will even be in order. But soon, momentum or no, I stumble into that dip up there that dampens the static from my initial excitement (hey, how’re you enjoying this extended weather metaphor? Figures of speech, amirite?). Sooner or later, no matter how fun the project is, no matter how enjoyable it is to kick around, you have to start actually making it. And making a thing is work, and fun that you realize has turned into work is a slightly jarring realization every time.
It’s like having to deal with sudden, freezing water on your bare skin before you can enjoy the pool. It’s like that little ball of nervous, shy awkwardness you have to unravel every time you meet someone new. It’s like how even career actors and speakers and performers get a few jolts of stage fright in the few moments right before and right after appearing before a new audience of complete strangers. There’s a hurdle to most activities between the thought of doing them and doing them in earnest. And since writing tends to be an activity that draws itself out for far longer than you first think it will, the hurdle in it becomes more pronounced, easier to spot before you’re past it, and therefor takes a more concentrated effort to surmount.
Because it’s not enough for our everyday heroine to wake up in a strange new world, go, “Wow, this sure is interesting and different from what I’m used to in the following respects,” and then leave. No one would care about that. That doesn’t go anywhere or do anything for anybody. It isn’t a story yet – stories have expositions and deeper connotations and complex, intriguing characters, but stuff has to happen. Series’s of relevant events need to occur. I know how it begins, because I had the idea, and I know how it ends, because I know what I want the idea to be about, but how do I get there? What does the cynical twenty-something do between doubting the existence of magic and helping to save her world from a second Dark Age with the help of an underhanded monarch about to round his own character arc? Because both of those bookending ideas take, like, 50 pages at most to flesh out, but you’ve got another 250 in between them, and they can’t just play checkers with each other and discuss how they the one fantastical society is strangely reminiscent of the other mundane one. Unless you’re writing philosophy.
And for the reader’s sake, don’t just ramble off on a tangent with whatever thought next pops into your head and then leave it like that, all meandering and lost and directionless. Unless you’re writing a blog post.
Anyway, turns out the general point that I ended up trying to make here was already made by video game industry critic Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw in his Extra Punctuation column: “It’s not hard to come up with ideas. The real skill is communicating and developing them once the initial excitement of thinking it up has passed.”
Also, hi everyone! I have a blog now. I’m a try and keep it updated semi-regularly so I can get in the habit of forcing myself to write stuff even more often, because see above.
(P.S.: The story of the reluctant witch and the charlatan king in Hell is a work in progress with about 70 or so completed pages, most of them in order. Just gotta figure out the different levels of cultural bureaucracy that keep all seven tribes of demon functioning as a complete city-state and then it’s all smooth sailing from there.)
