| Chapter 1: Beginnings |
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| The only way to begin is to begin, and begin right now. If you like, begin the minute you finish reading this paragraph. For sure, begin before you finish reading this book. I have no doubt the day is coming when you will be wiser or better informed or more highly skilled than you are now, but you will never be more ready to begin writing than you are right this minute. The time has come. You already know, more or less, what a good story looks like. You've already got in mind some human situation that matters to you. You need nothing more. Begin with whatever gives you impertus to begin: an image, a fantasy, a memory, a motion, a situation, a set of people -- anything at all that arouses your imagination. The job is only to get some or all of this into words able to reach and touch an unknown, unseen somebody "out there" known as the Reader. You must plunge into it. And you must do it now. |
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| It would be nice, I suppose to begin at the perfect point in the story, in the perfect way, using the perfect voice, to present exactly the desired scene. Unfortunately, you have no choice but to be wholly clueless about all of this. The rightness of things is revealed in retrospect, and you're unlikely to know in advance what is right and wrong in a story that has not yet been written. So instead of waiting until everything is perfect, begin anyhow, anywhere, and any way. The result probably will not be exactly right. It may not be even close. So what? You're going to persist until you get it right. |
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While I'm sure you can think of good reasons to procrastinate, I very much doubt there's much real merit in any of them. There is no need to wait for inspiration, no need to find your confidence; no need to know exactly why or what you're writing; no need read wise and thoughtful books about how to write; no need to know your story; no need to understand your characters; no need to be sure you're on the right track; no need even for your research to be complete. No need now. Later on, it will be vey nice indeed to have some or all of these fine things. You will of course eventually want inspiration and confidence and self-knowledge and faith in your project and informed technique and a finished story with developed characters and completed competent research. But every single one of these things -- even the research -- comes to you only in the process of writing. They are the result of writing. If you let any one of them immobilize you before write, I can guarentee that a year from now you will still be waiting to begin. The belief that you must have them to begin is the most common mistake of all, and it is fatal. Right here -- on the jagged rocks of that false belief -- is where most good ideas break up and sink without trace. Inspiration and confidence and conviction and craft and knowledge are not what make writing possible. It's exactly the other way around. Writing makes them possible.
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| "The common conception of how novels get written," says martin Amis, "seems to me to be exact descriptions of writer's block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he's sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it's never like that. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer's part. At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about." |
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| Isak Dinesen used to say much the same: "I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story. But all this ends by being a plot." Robert Penn Warren began the same way. "Any book I write starts with a flash..." A "throb." A "tingle." A "flash." Pretty flimsy stuff. Most people have spent a lifetime shunting shimmers like htat out of their minds. Now you must recognize them as a call to action, as a promise of what is to come. |
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| And you must sit down and write. It doesn't even really matter if you feel like writing. As Tom Wolfe says, "Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. There's a marvelous essay that Sinclair Lewis wrote on how to write. He said that most writers don't understand that the process begins by actually sitting down." Joyce Carol Oates agrees: "One must be pitiless about this matter of 'mood.' In a sense, the writing will create the mood.... Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been uterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything." |
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| The above text is an excerpt from Stephen Koch's Modern Library Writer's Workshop. |
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