Defeat the Blank-Page Blues
Get the Ink Flowing on Your First Draft
There are two kinds of people: Those who understand binary.
Haha, just kidding! There are infinite kinds of people. There are more kinds of people than there are actual people. But for the purpose of today’s Shelf Life on getting down to brass tacks and writing the first page of your manuscript, there are two kinds of people:
Those who see a blank page as a glorious invitation to fill it; and
Those who see a blank page as an ominous threat: “Go ahead, ruin me.”
This doesn’t apply to just writing, but to all kinds of things that involve making the first indelible mark. I’m the latter kind of person, and I find a blank page intimidating. When I was in art school a million years ago, I experienced this in the first painting class I took. I spent as much time as possible adjusting my sketch trying to delay the moment when I would, inevitably, have to splash some paint on my canvas. Once you do that, you’re committed to whatever you’re doing. You can erase a sketch but you can’t really unpaint a canvas. I mean, you can gesso over it to reuse the canvas. But we weren’t allowed to.
My classmate Luci was often at the next easel to me and she had no such reservations about splashing paint around and also was much smarter than me. One day she had enough of me stressing out over the first brush stroke so she came over and said, “Your problem is you’re afraid you’ll mess up the canvas.” Then she dashed a few strokes of paint along my sketch lines, painting in the perspective of the scene. “There, now I’m responsible for messing it up.” And went back to her own work.
She was right—the lines she painted weren’t exactly the way I had envisioned doing them myself, but I was able to adjust my plan and work with them. Once the first paint is down, the rest is easy. Many were the canvases and linoleum blocks I turned over to Luci later with a quiet “Hey, can you ruin this for me?”
I still have this problem today with blank documents, fresh notebook pages, the insides of greeting cards, fabric pieces that need cutting, and new cars that don’t have a single scratch on them (yet). Fortunately, I learned from Luci that I can always work around a bad initial effort if I have to. You can always adjust course in light of a mistake. You just have to make yourself start so you have something to adjust.
One of the questions I see a lot—and answer a lot—in the writing groups I’m in, is this one:
“I’ve got my story all plotted out, I’ve developed the characters, I’ve done the worldbuilding—I’m just not sure where to start the draft. What should I do?”
That right there is a sure sign of being afraid to mess up the blank page with a wrong start. It’s phrased as being unsure of where in the story to begin—what scene to start with—but if they weren’t afraid of choosing the wrong starting point they wouldn’t have had to ask. They’d have just started somewhere.
A great thing about drafting a manuscript is that the first thing you write does not have to be the first part of your book. You can move all the pieces around later—even if you’re writing your draft longhand. If you’re using a word processor, it’s even easier. Cut and paste are your friends.
Truthfully, there’s no wrong place to start writing your draft. But if the advice herein can help anyone who is struggling with laying down that first sentence in their blank document—then I can provide some guidance on where and how to start your manuscript. It’s really easy, because there’s only two places you can start a manuscript.
The beginning.
Anywhere besides the beginning.
See? Simple.
Start at the Beginning
As I noted above, the part you write first doesn’t have to be the part that comes first in your final manuscript. But further, the part that comes first in your manuscript needn’t be chronologically first in the story. That’s why anywhere you want to start is fine. You can reorder it later—but you don’t have to.
That said, if beginning at the beginning appeals to you, it’s a very straightforward way to begin your draft. The only trick is figuring out where your real beginning is. I see a lot of new writers starting earlier than they ought to—this is a problem I had myself, in my first full-length manuscript. There’s a temptation to set your reader up with some background—to tell them who the main character is as soon as you introduce her, and then load them up with all the information they need to understand what she’s doing, where she’s going, what her motivations are. Resist the temptation! Trust your reader to pick it up as they go along.
Start at the Latest Possible Moment
This is the time-honored advice that pretty much everybody will give you: Start your story at the last possible moment you can without omitting anything that’s crucial to the story. So you want to start as close to the inciting incident as you can without going past it. It’s kind of like The Price Is Right. Come on down.
Starting before the inciting incident isn’t mandatory, although everyone giving out advice acts like it is. Sometimes the narrative begins after the inciting incident has happened. What’s the inciting incident that sets Hamlet in motion? Hamlet’s father dies—but that happens before the story begins. The story opens with Bernardo, Francisco, Horatio, and Marcellus encountering his ghost. When a story starts after the inciting incident, it is beginning in medias res (“in the middle of things”). The exposition needed to fill in the reader’s picture of what happened before the start of the manuscript comes in the form of dialogue or flashbacks.
So if you want to begin at the beginning, you should start right before or right after the inciting incident—begin as it’s about to happen, as it’s happening, or immediately in the aftermath.
Start Where the Ordinary Is Disrupted
Now—how do you figure out which incident is your inciting incident? I know when I conceptualize a novel—or any story I’m going to tell—I know way more story than what’s going to be covered by the plot. For a science fiction or fantasy story or an epic, I might know about important events stretching back hundreds or thousands of years. How do I pick the one that kicks off the plot?
As I touched on in a recent article, John Gardner famously said there are only two ways for a story to begin: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. This is a bit oversimplified but in general it’s true—every story has beginnings in the places where ordinary life is disrupted. Where something forces a character off the track they’re comfortably rolling along and onto a new path, one they didn’t expect and were not prepared for. And most of the time that happens when someone leaves their home and their normal routine, or their home and normal routine are interrupted by the appearance of someone new.
Take your main character and look at their trajectory through the story you want to tell: What is their “normal” life before the action begins? How does it get disrupted in a way that is beyond their control? What incites the disruption? If you want to start at the beginning, that’s a great place to start. Don’t write Tristram Shandy, okay. Don’t start so early that you don’t get to your main character’s birth until Chapter 3.
Start Anywhere Besides the Start
The other place you can start a story is anywhere else. Glad to have narrowed that down for you. You’re welcome. As I said above, if you want to start somewhere other than the beginning, you can write your manuscript out of order and then put it in order later, or you can write it out of order in a way that it’s told out of order—both are totally fine. I’ve got some advice for how to start if you intend to go back and reorder everything later, and I’ve got advice for those who want to tell their story in a non-chronological way.
Start With Whatever Calls You
If you’re not especially concerned with writing in order, then the logical place to start is with whatever scene is calling you—whatever is most vivid in your mind, whatever you’re thinking about right now, whatever you’ve planned the most carefully, so that you feel confident it will come together fast and seamlessly.
There can be some danger inherent in this method—only you can know if this will be true for you or not. If you find your story is a patchwork of scene types that you enjoy writing and scene types that you dread writing, then knocking out all the fun-to-write scenes may never yield a complete manuscript. It’s a great idea to start with a scene you’re excited about just to break the surface tension on your new, blank document—but make sure you have a plan to propel yourself all the way through the narrative.
Start With the Most Interesting Scene
One of my favorite techniques for starting to write anything is to begin somewhere around the most interesting scene in the book—usually somewhere near the climax—and then backtrack to the inciting incident. This is a great exercise to help get your brain working on how to get all your characters to that critical late-game point, but it’s also a technique for pulling readers immediately into the story.
Slaughterhouse Five, The Secret History, and One Hundred Years of Solitude all employ this strategy, dropping you into the story right at a climactic point and just when you’re going, “Wait, who are these people and why did they kill their friend? Who is Colonel Aureliano Buendía and why is he about to be executed? How in the world did Billy Pilgrim get unstuck from time and wind up in a zoo exhibit on Tralfamadore?!”—the writer stops and says, “Hang on, let me go back to the beginning.” This works best when the dramatic climax of your story is so far removed from where the story began—the outcome so far-fetched—that your reader can’t help but press on to figure out how it went from point A to point B.
If you’re interested in trying this narrative approach, look for the highest or lowest point your main character experiences around the climax of the story. Take them from the highest moment—when everything is going well for them—right up to when everything crashes down around them. Alternately, show your main character at their lowest point, when everything has been taken away and their situation seems impossible to rectify. Then—pull the rug out from under your reader and send them back to the inciting incident without passing Go.
Things to Start Without
However, wherever, and whenever you’re planning to start your story, there are a few things you should make sure the beginning does not have. These are tropes that rarely serve the purpose of the story and should be omitted in almost every case. Here are a few of the worst offenders, lovingly selected from my own work because I have done all these things in early drafts.
Mirror, Mirror
You absolutely, positively, do not need a passage in which your main character looks in a mirror and describes what they see, or ruminates on their own appearance in their mind, or looks upon the object of their affection and describes that person in great detail. Everyone wants to write this but nobody wants to read it. You need one or two memorable traits for each character to help your reader keep them straight. JKR is pretty good at this: Harry, glasses and scar. Hermione, bushy brown hair. Ron, ginger. McGonagall, stern and Scottish. Dumbledore, beard and twinkly eyes. One or two things. No one wants a litany of appearance details. Leave it out.
Exposition Imposition
The temptation to make sure readers thoroughly understand the backstory and worldbuilding is strong. I know, I do it too. The long passages where your character is thinking about where they’re from and how far they’ve come from there. All the little details you picked up in your research that you want to pack in. Resist! Leave them out!
I’m not good at following my own advice. The first chapter of everything I write is jam packed with exposition. I have given up on trying not to do this and instead, when I’m done drafting or when I have a couple chapters in the bag, I go back and remove the first chapter. Then I re-read the first chapter that I’ve removed and make a list of the critical pieces of exposition—the ones that are material to the plot. I make a list of them. These are tidbits that have to be worked into dialogue in later chapters. The rest can go on the cutting floor unless there’s a real, valid reason to bring them back in.
Nobody wants ten pages of exposition before they get down to the action unless they are listening to your audiobook to help them fall asleep.
Prologue
Every new writer, it seems, wants to include a prologue. All the advice out there is not to do this. But on the other hand, all these famous books have them. A Game of Thrones and all its sequels. The books in the Wheel of Time series. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Chapter 1 isn’t called a prologue, but it functions as a prologue). The Stand has one. Listen, if you’ve written something that epic and that salable, maybe you can get away with a prologue but most agents and editors hate them.
Personally, I hate the prologue from A Game of Thrones that introduces the Others and the one from The Eye of the World that takes place at Dragonmount and the one from HP1 that focuses on the commotion outside the Dursley house. I do not care about these characters. I could not be less interested in these prologues. I would have put the book down halfway through the prologue and never picked it up again except that I had compelling external reasons to read—dear friends had insisted I read The Eye of the World and Harry Potter, and I had already read part of the first chapter of A Game of Thrones so I knew direwolf puppies would make an appearance very soon. If not for those things, if I had come into those prologues blind, those books would have gone in the did-not-finish pile.
The Stand has the only prologue of the above that I appreciate. Why? Because King gets down to business right away. The Stand’s prologue starts with a man shaking his wife awake in the middle of the night and telling her they have to get out of dodge right now. This is interesting and it makes me want to know what’s going on. The guy in A Game of Thrones riding his horse around in the woods feeling vaguely creeped out and wanting to go home for ten pages is not interesting. I do not want to know what’s going on. I want to know when we get to the puppies.
If you feel very strongly about starting with a prelude that takes place before the action of your story begins, you might consider:
Writing a short story or novelette as a separate piece.
Loading your prologue with action and foreshadowing.
Drafting a prologue to get it out of your system and then removing it from the final draft.
Very few books truly benefit from a prologue. When you see that famous authors have them in their books, it is usually not because the book is well-served by the prologue but because the author has enough clout to get their way. HP1, A Game of Thrones, and The Eye of the World all start much stronger if you skip the prologue material. Start your book as strong as possible. If there’s an element you absolutely have to introduce, like White Walkers or the sad business at Godric’s Hollow or the madness of Lews Therin Telamon, find a way to work it into the book later.
You only have so many words to get your reader to invest in your story. Make them count.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.