Beginning is the second-most difficult part of writing (the most difficult is finishing what you start) and I’d been struggling with it for the last few months, when the writer’s block was rather more severe than usual. I wanted to write, but just couldn’t get started. I didn’t know where to begin. I had a hundred ideas but how did I know which one was worth my time and effort? Choosing among them was tiring, time-consuming, and the more time I spent on considering my ideas, the more I hated them and the more convinced I was that I wasn’t ready to write the story/essay in question.
So one day I just picked up a ruled sheet of paper, then started listing all the things I wanted to write. The list looked something like this:
- The student aboard a university on wheels
- The weather diarist
- In praise of public transport
- Why I love Delhi
- What is love?
- Textbooks as storybooks
I gave a number to each item on the list. Some were titles, some where theses, some were characters I didn’t know what to do with or settings I wanted to build. The sort of stuff we quickly jot down in our notebooks, but never get around to doing anything with because in themselves they feel inadequate.
(While I did come up with some new ideas as I was making this list, most items were ideas I’d been thinking about for a long while but hadn’t actually executed in any way.)
Once I had my numbered list of around 52 ideas, I asked Google to give me a random number between 1 and 52. Then, I picked the item that had the resulting number and simply started writing about it.
Some ideas required dozens of pages by the time I had finished talking about them; others ran out of steam in a couple of paragraphs and I realised I just liked the idea of the idea and not the idea itself—it wasn’t something I was really interested in writing. On some days, when the urge to write was strong and I also had the time, I’d do a few back-to-back sessions with my list, tackling 3-4 different ideas.
Within a couple of weeks, I’d attempted writing every item on my list. There was no chance to worry about whether or not I was ready to write about a topic once the generator chose it for me. I had to do what I could with it.
And it turned out that more often than not, it wasn’t that I wasn’t prepared—it was that I was scared. But that fear of not being good enough for an idea vanished when I simply started writing.
Something like that shouldn’t be so hard, but perfectionism makes everything look more difficult than it actually is.
As long as the choice of the topic was up to me, I couldn’t proceed. The moment I let a random number generator pick my ideas for me, writing became easier. I didn’t worry about research, I didn’t worry about not knowing what I wanted to say or what the characters wanted. Instead of thinking about writing, I actually wrote. I ended up writing more words and more individual pieces—stories and essays I’d wanted to write—than I had done in months.
All because of a simple list.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
