Once you’ve decided you’re going to write, how do you actually start? Well, you start with an idea—but where do you get those? Over a decade of writing, I’ve tried to find countless answers to that question. But there’s only one that actually holds weight, that proves its truth repeatedly, no matter how long you’ve been writing or the form in which you’re working, and it’s not a particularly pleasing answer, which is this: the ideas come after you start writing.
Usually, we have some vague idea of what we’re working towards—a memoir about our grandparents, for example, or a story about a con club led by a dragon. The trouble, actually, is not knowing what the first sentence should be. Writing down any words feels scary, a big step, because the words that follow will depend on that first sentence. It feels like a commitment.
And so we prepare. We read, we research, we draw outlines, we brainstorm titles. We prepare but we never actually start writing because we think we don’t have any ideas.
But that’s not true. We don’t lack ideas—we lack courage. The only solution is to start writing. The first sentence is not at all the big deal that we make it out to be, not when we’re birthing a story or an essay or a poem. The opening lines that we celebrate so much—Fahrenheit 451’s “It was a pleasure to burn” or Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael” —reached to us in their final versions. It is folly to compare those published versions with our unbirthed ones.
Yes, you might say,I understand that my first line is just a draft, but what words do I actually put down?
There are two ways we can approach this. The first is a method practiced by Ray Bradbury (whose excellent collection Zen in the Art of Writing is a must-read for all writers). In his delightful interview with The Paris Review, Bradbury recommended that writers make lists of nouns, of the things they love or hate. Then you pick one of those items and write pensées. This is how he described the process:
“[…] I started to write short, descriptive paragraphs, two hundred words each, and in them I began to examine my nouns. Then I’d bring some characters on to talk about that noun and that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going. I used to do the same thing with photographs that I’d rip out of glossy magazines. I’d take the photographs and I’d write little prose poems about them.”
I’ve done this several times, testing out the first lines of a poem, describing a setting in which my story will take place, or asking a question with which to lead an essay. Even when I’m writing these articles for Authors Publish, I start with whatever words come to mind and realise, as I write, that there’s a better way to begin the piece. So I simply hit enter and write that. The goal is to keep moving, rather than staying stuck on the first sentence once I start.
The second solution I’ve found is this: Start writing that you cannot think of a topic. It’s a complaint, a lament. Usually, those compel us to elaborate. We start telling the page what we’re trying to do. In the process, we either figure out a cause for our block that we may have not been aware of, or we find ourselves narrating our story—and suddenly there are the words we were looking for!
As William Campbell Gault said: “If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.”
This is the lesson I’ve learned and relearned over the last 10 years: to just start with any words, and not wait for ideas to come to me. There were times when I was very clear on what I wanted to say in an essay, or where a story would end. But those were pieces that I wrote half-heartedly or that I never finished (or in some cases, never even started) because for me the fun part is discovering the piece as I write. Knowing the ending beforehand kills my writing because I have to force my way to the conclusion, which is a miserable experience. (And I don’t believe that writing should be all pain and no fun.)
Every time I’ve sat there trying to come up with a bunch of “good enough” words, I’ve written nothing. Forgetting this lesson made me doubt my abilities as a writer. I felt frustrated because I had the time and the tools and the motivation but not the words. I procrastinated, and my writing stagnated. When I practiced jumping into the unknown, I wrote, and I wrote a lot. My brain offered me more ideas and suddenly I had to pick from them, rather than go hunting for them. Writing fed writing. That abundance of words fed me in turn, and I was nourished, satiated, happy. And I believe that writers should be happy.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
