(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Question: How Do I ACTUALLY Start Writing?

Short answer: Estab­lish writ­ing as a habit instead of a sin­gle cre­ative endeav­or, learn to trust that the process is messy and involves lots of rewrit­ing and revi­sion instead of try­ing to get it right on the first shot, take what­ev­er logis­ti­cal steps you need to help you, and if all else fails, kick-start your writ­ing with some­one else’s writ­ing. 

Longer answer: First of all, sym­pa­thies. Start­ing can be real­ly hard. Unlike some con­de­scend­ing memes, I don’t think writer’s block isn’t REAL. I just think it is inher­ent­ly not a cre­ativ­i­ty prob­lem. It is inher­ent­ly a psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lem, usu­al­ly with want­i­ng to get the writ­ing right with­out trust­ing that one will have to go through the lengthy process of rewrit­ing, revi­sion, and edit­ing. Once that process is more ful­ly trust­ed and the “Make myself be cre­ative” strain­ing (com­plete with ago­nized grunt­ing) is replaced with sim­ply sit­ting down to work and hav­ing the words and ideas come in a gen­er­ous flow, you will prob­a­bly find that the only prob­lem you ever have is hav­ing more ideas than you could ever write down, and hav­ing to choose the best of them to work on.

Sec­ond­ly, the way out is through, but it’s kind of a long trip. I would­n’t expect to be spin­ning around on gen­tle Euro­pean alive-with-music hills by this time tomor­row. Entire­ly new approach­es to writ­ing need to be learned, tech­niques prac­ticed, and habits estab­lished. It can take.….well there’s no upper lim­it to how long it can take, but even if you’re going pret­ty fast, it’s not like­ly to hap­pen in less than a cou­ple of months, and prob­a­bly more like six or more.

Of course, at any point in this process, if the words are com­ing, you can go back to what you were doing. The risk is that you’ll end up stuck again. By far, the main rea­son writ­ers get writer’s block and sit for hours in front of a blank page is because they are gripped by the over­whelm­ing need to get it RIGHT. They are hav­ing trou­ble think­ing of a good first sen­tence or the per­fect thing to hap­pen next. If you go back to what you were doing because you basi­cal­ly thought of some­thing to write, you might end up stuck again at the next place you feel you must get right. What you real­ly want is to learn a whole new approach to writing––one that is habit-based instead of goal-based. One where the faucet just “turns on” when you want it to. One where you just sit down to two (or ten) hours of dai­ly work instead of try­ing to sit down and write a short sto­ry.

I will tell you some jump-starts though. I’m noth­ing if not ver­sa­tile. If you just want a fix for RIGHT NOW, today, try the fol­low­ing:

• Skip ahead. (Start on page 2 or Chap­ter 2 or what­ev­er. You can come back and write the per­fect first sen­tence.)
• Turn off all your devices and leave them off. (Dis­trac­tion can keep you from going deep into your cre­ative imag­i­na­tion.)
• Spend a set amount of time NOT writ­ing. (Don’t go do any­thing else, but sit there for a half hour or so and just let your mind wan­der. Don’t end ear­ly. No mat­ter how many good ideas come.)
• Try to write BADLY (Quit try­ing to make it good. Try to make it the worst you can imag­ine. Self-indul­gent. Pur­ple. Hack­neyed. Clichéd. Make it the worst.)
• Caf­feine. (Look, I know it’s not exact­ly kosher to sug­gest drugs, but caf­feine is a mild stim­u­lant and it can start neu­rons fir­ing with­out mak­ing you too high to write. It’s also a habit-form­ing drug (as mild as it is), so be ful­ly informed and choose wise­ly. It’s also not going to do much if you’re already a six-cups-a-day type. But every once in a while, it can real­ly kick-start a slow ses­sion…)
• Pick up a book that is a lit­tle like what you want to be writ­ing. Open the book and start writ­ing the words you see. You will want to “take over” with your own words prob­a­bly with­in five to ten min­utes. (You sim­ply CANNOT write as fast as you think and so your brain is going to be play­ing with the ideas you’re writ­ing and start to come up with thoughts of its own. You’ve also “ruined” your beau­ti­ful blank page, so you might as well just write what­ev­er now. If you end up writ­ing a mas­ter­piece, you’ll still have to go edit the begin­ning [since you did­n’t write that part and it would be pla­gia­rism], and that may help give you the feel­ing of free­dom enough to write on your own.)

How­ev­er, if you are more inter­est­ed in nev­er hav­ing writer’s block again, and con­sis­tent­ly being able to write eas­i­ly each and every time you come to the page, you may have to invest a lit­tle more time in some­thing a bit like a “writ­ing train­ing reg­i­men.”

• First you’re going to do morn­ing writ­ing. (Get up ear­ly if you have to and write in the morn­ing. This is FREEWRITING, so don’t work on any­thing in progress. Write what­EV­ER comes into your head even if it’s about how hard you find it not know­ing what to write.)
• The first few days, you will estab­lish a base­line amount for how much you can eas­i­ly write before the ideas start to peter out and your brain sort of gets tired. Dou­ble That Amount. (This time might be 30 min­utes or it might be an hour. You want to keep doing this morn­ing writ­ing until that amount pret­ty much DOUBLES. [So if you find you are able to eas­i­ly write for 30 min­utes when you start before run­ning out of steam, you want to keep doing this morn­ing writ­ing exer­cise until you can eas­i­ly write for 60 min­utes.] It may feel like you will nev­er get to this point, but it will. This is such a vital part of the process that it is not an exag­ger­a­tion to tell you to keep writ­ing in the morn­ings until this hap­pens even if it takes years.)
• Dis­con­tin­ue your morn­ing writ­ing for the next part. You should be almost over­flow­ing with ideas basi­cal­ly all the time and maybe feel­ing a lit­tle “psy­chi­cal­ly” uncom­fort­able.
• Now estab­lish an abil­i­ty to do a float­ing half hour of writ­ing at ANY time. (This will NOT be easy. Pick a dif­fer­ent half-hour slot every day and sit down and write dur­ing that half hour AND NO OTHER. You may try to weasel out of the writ­ing for “just today,” you may try to shift the slot around because “one half hour is as good as anoth­er,” or you may want to just do an hour the next day. No mat­ter what, you must do the half hour and at the time you picked.
• At this point, you should be able to draw upon your inner well­spring of cre­ativ­i­ty any time you sit down. The words will come at your com­mand.
• Do your best to write every day. Or six days a week. Or at least every week­day like a job. 
• Estab­lish a dai­ly writ­ing time if there’s any way you can. Despite the incred­i­ble ver­sa­til­i­ty of being able to sit down and write at any time (espe­cial­ly if you have kids), you will get bet­ter, more con­sis­tent cre­ativ­i­ty from your “muse” if you can sit down at the same time every day. You’ll start to have ideas FLOWING about fif­teen min­utes before a “ses­sion” starts. Your muse knows it works for you, and not the oth­er way around, and it’s bring­ing you The Good Stuff™.
• In gen­er­al, read more. I can’t under­score enough how much read­ing (and I mean a LOT) will help keep your cre­ativ­i­ty tank “topped off” both with ideas for sto­ries and with ideas about how to write them.

Between your quick fix­es and your New Habit Reg­i­men™, you should be able to (actu­al­ly) start writ­ing at any time you want to. And now you can approach the page as a mat­ter of rou­tine and reg­i­men instead of a sin­gle act of got­ta-get-it-right cre­ativ­i­ty. Once you have a cre­ative flow that essen­tial­ly obeys you (you con­trol­ling your muse instead of your muse con­trol­ling you — if you are okay with that metaphor), your writ­ing ses­sions will feel much more like sit­ting down to just do your thing for a few hours (or more).

Here’s anoth­er ver­sion of the same answer. Because some­times I answer the exis­ten­tial ques­tions that trou­ble so many writ­ers, even if they’re already in the FAQ. 

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

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