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During the final rewrite phase of my novel, Misfit McCabe, leading up to publication, I worked with a class of young readers to preview the manuscript and provide feedback. This is the twelfth in a series of articles about fiction writing aimed at young writers. This article focuses on how to get those crucial first words on the page and keep your creative juices flowing.
You've made sure that your writing environment is comfortable, you have done some brainstorming and come up with an idea that you want to make into a story, you have written the synopsis, made character sketches and drafted your outline. You are ready to actually get down to the business of writing the story.
For some writers this is the most difficult part; facing the blank page. There it is staring at you, no words written or a blinking cursor on a blank page of a computer screen. The beginning of any story is the most important isn't it? So how do you start? What should be the first word?
I have written many first sentences to start a story, re-read the sentence and scratched it out, or deleted it. Again, and again I would write a sentence only to deem it not good enough. I would end up with an entire page of scratched out entries and still not have a beginning to my story. How do we avoid this?
- Do some writing prompts. When we exercise, it is always best to do some warm up activities before starting the actual exercise itself. Stretches are recommended to limber up the muscles and get the blood flowing to all of the right parts of your body. Writing prompts are just like those exercises for the writing side of your brain. By starting with writing something that has absolutely nothing to do with your story gets your creative juices flowing and gets you ready to focus on your main task, which is writing your story.
What is a writing prompt? A writing prompt is an idea jogger or brain starter. Simply put, it is a question or an idea that you write a response to.
- Where can you find writing prompts? If you have access to a computer, you can use Google, or Yahoo, or any other search engine and do a search for writing prompts. Writers Digest has some good ones. There are also books that you can buy which are designed to help you stimulate ideas. Some good examples of those types of books are The Writer's Book of Matches and Writer's Little Instruction Book.
- A few sample writing prompts would be:
- Create a character that has an unusual phobia. Write a scene that causes that character to face his fear.
- You bump into a genie and she offers to grant you three wishes. What are your wishes and why?
- Write a 26-word story where every word begins with a different letter of the alphabet.
- Relax. If you get too worked up over writing a sensational beginning, your work will suffer for it. By putting too much stress on yourself to write a fantastic beginning, what happens is that your creativity is stifled and is not being allowed to flow. By relaxing and realizing that you don't have to write the perfect beginning the first time out, your ideas will flow much more readily and your story will improve.
- Don't sweat it if you get stuck. Get up, walk around. Sometimes a change in environment for even a few minutes is all you need to do to get the creativity flowing again. Walking tends to clear your mind.
- Don't edit what you are writing while you are writing it. A first draft is always very rough, and trust me, you'll have plenty of other opportunities to go back and edit your work. Your purpose at this point in the writing game is to simply get the ideas down on paper. You're not aiming for perfection or anything even close to it. It's time for the critical part of your brain to pipe down, go to sleep, or if necessary, send it on vacation. When you can block out the critical part of your brain, your ideas will flow onto the page and give you plenty of good stuff to edit later.
- Start off generally. You don't want to start you story in the middle of your plot, so take some time to do some introductions first. Set the scene.
- If you are still having trouble getting started, then opt for a classic style beginning. Start with a description of your characters or the surrounding scenery.
Once you get started, you'll notice that the writing becomes easier.
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LK Gardner-Griffie
Visit me at Griffie World
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